“It was all so different than he expected. / For years he’d been agnostic; now he meditated. / For years he’d dreamed of being an artist living abroad; / now he reread Baudelaire, Emerson, Bishop. / He’d never considered marriage … / Still, a force through the green fuse did drive.” So begins Henri Cole’s poem “At Sixty-Five,” which appears in The Other Love, forthcoming in July from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a collection in which Cole reflects on the shifting observations of a person as they age and gain new perspective on the passing of time and the accumulation of memories. Write a short story from the point of view of someone older than you, which begins with the sentence “It was all so different than I expected.” Is your inclination to plot out key milestones in your character’s life before you begin writing or to simply see where the character’s meditations take you?