“A Tangle of Green Men” by Charles de Lint will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. T.J. McIntyre interviews him on the story.

When writing in a shared world like Bordertown, how do you keep your stories your own? The setting is already laid out, so how do you make it your own without sacrificing consistency with others’ visions?

You’ve probably heard the old saying that if you give ten writers the same plot you’ll get ten very different stories–if the writers are any good, of course. The same applies to a shared setting such as this. We might use characters and places from each other’s stories but when we do, they’re filtered through our own voices so they can’t help but be individual. I think the magic of the Bordertown books is how the characters we create can travel through the various stories and still remain themselves (or maybe that’s the magic of a good editor’s touch).

But the point is, I’ve never worried about my stories not being my own in Bordertown. Maybe that’s because I was there in the beginning when a handful of us got to flesh out Terri Windling’s original vision so I feel a bit of proprietorship. But mostly I think it’s because the books are a bit like a musical jam and our individual stories only get better when they bang up against what the others are writing. The characters become more real when one can see their footprints beyond the confines of what we’ve asked them to do in our own stories.

MORE: Read the rest of the interview here!