I Read To Make Myself Feel Awake.

So Much Of What I Am Doing In My Fiction Is Just Trying To Get Into Interesting Places In Terms Of Language Or Form, Places That Don't Bore Me. And This Happens Via Hundreds Of Quick Micro-decisions That Are Done "to Taste," So To Speak. So The Experience Is One Of Groping Toward That Interesting Place - Trying To Leap Away From Anything That Seems Boring, Or About Which I Don't Have Strong Opinions. Essentially Trying To Avoid That Moment Where, Devoid Of Any Strong Feeling, I Start Conceptualizing.

My General Approach To Writing Fiction Is That You Try To Have As Few Conceptual Notions As Possible And You Just Respond To The Energy That The Story Is Making Rather Than Having A Big Over Plan. I Think If You Have A Big Over Plan, The Danger Is That You Might Just Take Your Plan And Then You Bore Everybody. I Always Joke That It's Like Going On A Date With Index Cards. You Know, At 7:30 P.m. I Should Ask About Her Mother. You Keep All The Control To Yourself But You Are Kind Of Insulting To The Other Person.

I Have A Sense That God Is Unfair And Preferentially Punishes His Weak, His Dumb, His Fat, His Lazy. I Believe He Takes More Pleasure In His Perfect Creatures, And Cheers Them On Like A Brainless Dad As They Run Roughshod Over The Rest Of Us. He Gives Us A Need For Love, And No Way To Get Any. He Gives Us A Desire To Be Liked, And Personal Attributes That Make Us Utterly Unlikable. Having Placed His Flawed And Needy Children In A World Of Exacting Specifications, He Deducts The Difference Between What We Have And What We Need From Our Hearts And Our Self-esteem And Our Mental Health.

I Guess What I'm Trying To Say Is That Whatever Weirdness Was Going To Be In There, I Felt, Had To Be Earned. And It Had To Be Required By The Emotional Needs Of The Book.

Whatever Happens When We Die, It Would Be Really Weird If It Was What We Had Expected. Even If You Were A Lifelong Christian Believer, It Would Be Kind Of Weird If There Actually Were Pearly Gates.