I wrote a story called “Cup and Table” (reprinted in this very magazine back in 2012!) many years ago, about a secret society of people with weird powers on a sacred quest to find an ancient artifact . . . who made money in the meantime by hiring themselves out as mercenaries and assassins. While that story has a rather, ah, definitive end for the characters, I always had the notion in the back of my mind that I could dip into their lives at other points and tell different stories about them.

First-person writing is something I often see done poorly, especially if it’s meant to come across as something people might actually say. I remember reading a story that was supposed to be a collection of people sitting around a campfire and telling stories to each other, but it was clearly all in written language and not spoken; you could tell, if you tried to read the sentences out loud, that they didn’t flow in a natural, conversational way.

This story was a bizarre blend of magic and science that didn’t apologize for itself and assumed everyone was on board with the imposed world. And it opened with an image, though it took seeing Allen Douglas’ painting of Isaak for me to truly feel the power of it: A metal man found weeping in a crater by Rudolfo’s Gypsy Scouts and a story about an unlikely ally in a king who want to replace some of what that act of terror had taken from the world.

When my wife was pregnant with our third child, she did a ton of research and created a birth plan of her own, which her doctor promptly ignored. I was annoyed at how dismissive certain medical professionals were about her questions and concerns, and that emotion helped prompt the story. So I suppose the first thing I knew was that the main character, the mother-to-be of an entirely new form of life, wasn’t just going to have to deal with the physical and emotional implications of being pregnant.

I think it might be easier to write a sad ending than a happy one. Sad or meh endings are a cultural default. People think a downer ending is tough, and hard, and realistic, and it’s bravely facing facts. So when you write a happy ending, you have to do it with the right touch, or people might think you’re corny or weak. But if you nail a happy ending, people like it. I almost always give my novels happy endings. People already know that life’s a bummer. So why rub that in their faces?

That’s the essence of what I consider a successful narrative conflict in a story: It’s a conflict that extends beyond what the characters are feeling and jumps into the head of a discomfited reader. Because let’s face it, the end of “Collateral” is pretty much the platonic ideal of Spock’s famous platitude, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Everybody loves that line.

The first books I read were fairy tales in Hungarian, which were always the darker versions. I think those have definitely influenced my writing. But the larger influence is European literature in general: I grew up reading Kafka and Kundera, Sartre and Nabokov, Dinesen and Colette. Part of it was being a pretentious teenager, as I think most writers probably were. But part of it was missing something, and reading anything that contained what seemed to be missing, a certain approach to the world. A sense of old beauty, a sense of age, I don’t know.