You can recognize in your own reading habits what writers are doing that works and what doesn’t. I’m becoming much more aware of that after reading a decade of student stories.
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.
The danger in writing about a world you don’t know very well is that you can get lost in it, and sometimes I’ll end up with a hundred pages I don’t know what to do with.
I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down – it feels fatalistic in some way.
My main reader was my wife Sheila, and I haven’t written a lot since she died.
For me, the process of writing a novel happens mostly in your head before you actually start writing.
I knew I wanted to play around with genre-esque imagery, and the identity theft stuff came in the middle, when I was figuring out how the characters were connected to those images.
Plot was always secondary in my mind.
In some ways all of my fiction is like a conversation I’m having with the writers I read when I was first falling in love with books.
I realized that I had the choice. I could give this moment a meaning, or I could choose to ignore it. It just depended on the kind of story I wanted to tell myself.
The true terror Jonah thought the true mystery of life was not that we are all going to die but that we were all born that we were all once little babies like this unknowing and slowly reeling in the world gathering it loop by loop like a ball of string. The true terror was that we once didn’t exist and then through no fault of our own we had to.
I guess I always thought it would be bigger, when a terrible thing happened. Didn’t you think so? Doesn’t it seem like houses ought to be caving in, and lightning and thunder, and people tearing their hair in the street? I never – I never thought it would be this small, did you?
People can find patterns in all kinds of random events. It’s called apophenia. It’s the tendency we humans have to find meaning in disconnected information.
Their house was about a mile outside of town. The kids would play outdoors, in the backyard and the large stubble field behind the house. Dusk seemed to last for hours, and when it was finally dark they would sit under the porch light, catching thickly buzzing June bugs and moths, or even an occasional toad who hopped into the circle of light, tempted by the halo of insects that floated around the bare orange lightbulb next to the front door.
I never understood why people from the 1980s thought there would be flying cars. It just seemed really dangerous and impractical to me, but they all talked about it, so it must have been a thing. Meanwhile, my dream for the future was that it wouldn’t involve mass extinction and large-scale water shortages and cannibalism.
And he saw now that it wasn’t real. That it had never been real. He could feel that other life shrinking and losing its possibility, and he knew that it was something that he should never, ever, think of again.
We are always telling stories to ourselves, about ourselves... But we can control those stories... I believe that! Events in our life have meaning because we choose to give it to them.
Anxiety!” he said. “I’ve been there, plenty of times! And, you know, it’s particularly hard during the first one, especially, because you’re so invested in that idea of self. You grew up with that concept – you think there’s a real you – and you have some longstanding attachments, people you’ve known, and you start to think about them.
He was surprised at how useless his mind was.
We see things not as they are, but as we are. Because it is the ‘I’ behind the ‘eye’ that does the seeing.
It was disconcerting to live in a time in which accepting reality required a suspension of disbelief.