I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.
Reading and writing are the same thing; it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other.
The level at which my OCD enters my writing process isn't that I slap the keyboard - it's more along the lines of a compulsive need to swap syllables around, rework words and sentences - I revise for the pleasure and satisfaction of it, rather than out of a sense of duty.
I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow I keep myself sane.
I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, with all of its subjectivity, irrationality, and paradox, were those which made free use of myths and symbols, fantastic occurences, florid metaphors, linguistic experiments, etcetera - to depict the experiences of relatively 'realistic' characters - on the level of their emotions and psychology, rather than in terms of what kinds of lives they led or what kind of events they experience.
I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.
I try to write every day. I don't beat myself up about word counts, or how many hours are ticking by on the clock before I'm allowed to go and do something else. I just try to keep a hand in and work every single day, even if there are other demands or I'm on a book tour or have the flu or something, because then I keep my unconscious engaged with the book. Then I'm always a little bit writing, no matter what else I'm doing.
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.
The world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.
I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.
Writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions.
You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.
So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.
Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle.
I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.
I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
I'd excluded New York from my writing, and then I came back and I fell in love with it all over again... The energy comes from an absence, that yearning for New York when you are not there.
When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode... I see the vernacular register of 20th century song as being a bunch of forms to adapt and reconfigure.
As much as I revere great writing, and am still humbled by it, literary activities are no longer esoteric to me. When I read a great novel - something that I could never have written myself - I'm still looking at it a little bit like a technician.
I listen to music all the time. I write while listening to music. And I tell myself that the music nourishes the art forms that I do master and domesticate, and have authority over.
I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.
My writing life is pretty simple - I try to work every day, almost always in the mornings - and I can only write fiction effectively for about three or at the most four hours. No big mysteries, I just sit down and try to advance the cause a little bit every day.
I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.
