My short story The “Last” Quagga is about quaggas developing mind control powers as a response to being hunted, so that they can make the hunters forget that they were there, and make people think they are extinct.

Naturally, as I was writing the story, my boyfriend wanted to know how the quaggas developed those abilities, etc, etc. He was thinking way too hard about it. While it is nice to have the facts, and if my short story were a full-on sci-fi novel it certainly would, they aren’t always necessary.

Look at Stephen King, one of the most popular authors of our time. Did he ever explain how the enchanted word-processor or the creatures from The Mist came to be? No. And even when he did give us the origin of some horrific thing, such as the disease from The Stand or the creature from It, he didn’t think overly hard about it and just gave us the most simplistic details about how those things came to be.