For me, the process of writing a novel happens mostly in your head before you actually start writing.
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.
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.
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.