I’m certainly very influenced by what you would call ‘contemporary headline horror,’ stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I’m always influenced by weird anecdotes and news.
I usually have more than one thing I’m working on at once – I’ve been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth.
I guess I’m curious about how people process grief and how they process loss. And I’m also interested in the ways in which an event can have long-reaching consequences and a life over the course of years.
Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else’s eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven’t actually experienced.
Maybe love, like suffering, is relative.
Writing about women’s sexuality is very scary for me because I’m always afraid I’ll get it wrong.
A lot of people work really diligently to maintain a “profile” in the writing world, but that’s so hard, and so boring most of the time. So you just keep doing what you like to do, I guess, and try to enjoy it.
You can’t count on notoriety lasting very long, and there’s no way to predict whether anyone will care about your books or you in three years, let alone ten or twenty.
I like to sleep about four or five really solid hours at night, and then sometimes take a nap in the afternoon or early evening after dinner. I love naps.
I tend to like order in almost every other aspect of my life, but for me, the process of writing is really chaotic and decadent and indulgent.
I never could figure out how those people like Bukowski could be both carousers and writers at the same time, because to me writing takes as much destructive energy as it takes to be a really good professional drunk.
There’s a lot of effort expended once you begin to completely trash your life. Sometimes, writing feels like this to me.
The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I read about in the grocery store tabloids my mom bought, situations that struck me as compelling, anecdotes I’d heard, images, words, metaphors.
A lot of time, with stories, I’ll start out with a title and try to dream myself into the story that it evokes – a kind of subconscious exercise in which I’m trawling for some kind of entryway into fiction.
A lot of times in my short fiction there isn’t much dramatized scene – there are a lot of short, interconnected bits, snippets of conversation, continual action, and so on. I frequently rely pretty heavily on voice.
I read a lot, but at the same time I’m not a particularly good or diligent or discriminating reader. I go through maybe close to a thousand or more books a year, but a lot of times I’ll only read bits and pieces of any one individual text.
I still think about the writers I loved when I was a kid.
When I was younger I was attracted to people who had that kind of artifice – people who were incredibly polished and had a complex persona that always seemed to be turned on. I was really interested in these kinds of people because I felt so unformed...
That’s how I work, whether with stories or novels – they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I’m walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing.
I keep a daily journal of whatever weird thought comes into my mind, like when I had a dream I was in North Dakota in the middle of a blizzard and for some reason the Egyptian pyramids were there, too – that I was able to shuffle into the book.