Having created Duchess as a fictional character who would talk to anyone meant that she did, in fact, have to talk to anyone. She answered every comment people made, and I had a couple of rules: I pushed myself to use every opportunity to respond as a chance to create an inevitable surprise for the reader: “inevitable” in the sense that once you saw it, there was no other response that would have been superior, and a “surprise” in that people couldn’t guess what she would say next. I tried to build in surprises around every corner.
