The Art of Writing

“If you let your unconscious write a story, then these symbols will emerge without you really realizing what it is that you’re doing. It’s always fun when people see things in your work that you didn’t—you weren’t even aware of doing. Just because you didn’t realize that your symbolism was working in a certain way doesn’t mean that it’s not there. But that’s what I love about the act of reading. Every reader brings something different to the work.”

“My process involved, first of all, a lot of reading [my work] out loud. I have to hear it in my ears to know if it sounds “right,” whatever that means.… The other really important task was figuring out how to evacuate my adult mind and my adult language and frameworks out of this kid, get the adult self out, and instead try to remember back to the poetics of children and to remember that there is such a thing as a philosopher kid.”

“One of the ways I researched [Your House Will Pay], because I actually don’t really like research, is I just talked to people as I ran into them.… People hold on to all these stories, and they’re not even necessarily holding on to them tightly.… Sometimes they’re just waiting for people to ask. But I think something that I’ve learned by writing crime fiction is just how close all of this hurt and violence is to the surface for so many people and how it’s just a part of our lives that is waiting to be uncovered.”

“Invention follows problems. I encounter a problem; I must find a solution. [When writing The Wrong End of the Telescope,] I couldn’t tell the story because I could not figure out the right distance to be looking at it from. I was both the volunteers and the refugees. And in some ways I loved both, and in some ways I hated both. So I could not pull away enough to see them clearly. The invention of Mina to come in and tell the story was a formal invention, but it was basically in response to the problems I was having.”

“If I’m trying to recollect a particular event, I’ll often try to remember, Oh, what was the music playing when that dinner conversation happened? Or, What was the album that came out that summer? I’m always trying to use sound and sight and smell and sensation as this sort of compass by which I am able to revisit past experiences.… They do become these guideposts that end up often leading me to where I’m not expecting, because they can open up these portals into the past, into memory, into associative thinking.”

“Momentum in writing translates to momentum in reading. That’s a bedrock understanding I have, so I’m always taking my own pulse in a way. I’m always saying, Am I moving? Do I have momentum in what I’m doing? Because if I notice that I’ve lost momentum, the reader’s going to lose that too. So I’ll back up and rewrite and try to make something more lean and mean and moving.”

“Stuff that sounds original, or sounds poetic, or sounds strange and mannered, or profound or whatever—most of it is just surf talk. I’m not trying to gild the lily and go beyond the way people talk to each other about waves.… Not every surfer would put it the way I would every time, but I’m trying to stick close to the language of the thing—I don’t know what you want to call it: the craft, the guild, the tribe.”

“It’s one thing to tell a good story and to go down the checklist of all of the things of craft that you’re told to do.… But I think really singular books are written by not considering what other people have done as much as that is possible.”