If I could go back and give my fifteen-year-old self one piece of advice about writing, it wouldn't be about point of view or plot structure or finding your voice. It would be this: be ambitious. Not ambitious about winning prizes or getting famous. Ambitious about what you believe you can write. I spent years approaching writing like I wasn’t qualified to do so. How could I presume to create characters as complex as those in the novels I admired? How could I hope to generate the kind of...