The Happiest I Have Ever Been Is

I Start With An Image, Then I Go From The Image Toward Exploring The Situation. Then I Write A Scene, And From The Scene I Find The Character, From The Character I Find The Larger Plot. It's Like Deductive Reasoning - I Start With The Smaller Stuff And Work Backward.

I'm Working With Fragments A Lot Of The Time And The Connective Tissue Isn't There Yet. I Think Of It The Way Comics Work. You Have A Block Here And A Block Here, And There's This White Space In Between. Somehow Your Mind Makes The Leap To Connect Those Two Blocks. Finding A Way To Trick Your Mind Into Connecting Those Blocks Is One Of The Fun Things For Me About Writing. You Can Have Those Leaps That Will Emerge Into Something, If You're Lucky.

Our Sense Of Self Is A Kind Of Construct. It Is In Some Ways Like A Novel, And It's Like A Fabric Of Fictions That We Patch Together From Memory.

Even When Our Death Is Imminent, We Carry The Image Of Ourselves Moving Forward, Alive, Into The Future.

I Think At A Certain Point The Book Develops A Certain Weight, Or Pressure. You've Been Pushing The Rock Up The Hill For A Long Time And Then It Starts To Roll And Things Do Start To Come Together In The Last Two Thirds.