do you ever have that with your characters? do you feel they've got close to you or into your heart or into your brain, and therefore it's hard to be objective about them ? the answer to that is yes, that it's almost always you develop a lot of feeling, because there is feeling in the air after a while. for the most part, those feelings don't, i think, affect how i write. but there are times when i know i have those feelings and i have to just make sure that they won't bother me when i write, but this wasn't one of them. do you have, like... tricks sounds glib, but do you have strategies that you fall back on to get people to open up? yeah. you do things with them. you don'tjust talk to them. you don'tjust have an interview. you play padel tennis or you go on a trip or you accompany them to their meetings. so i'm approaching this all wrong. well, we walked down the street and went to the book store together, and we've spent