I Learned To Write Fiction

My Inner Chemistry Had Been Hijacked By A Mad Scientist, Who Poured The Fizzy, Volatile Contents Of My Heart From A Test Tube Marked Sober Reality Into Another Labeled Sunny Delusion, And Back Again, Faster And Faster, Until The Floor Of My Life Was Slick With Spillage.

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've Always Been Passionately In Love With Movies, To Such A Degree That Even As A Young Person Of About Nineteen Or Twenty I Thought Maybe I Would Try To Become A Film Director. The Reason I Didn't Do It Was Because I Felt I Didn't Have The Right Personality. At That Time In My Life, I Was Mortally Shy.

I'm Gregarious With Writers And Never With Manuscripts . . . I [like To] Create The Illusion Of Seamless Perfection, So I Alone Know The Flawed Homely Process Along The Way.

I've Been An Advocate Against The View Of The Writer As A Partitioned Genius Hanging In Conceptual Space, Or Up On A Mountain, A Bringer Of Promethean Fire, Some Unique Transmission That Comes Out Of Nowhere. I Prefer The Opposite View - That Writers Come From Somewhere. They Read Things, And They Think About Them, And They Incorporate Other People's Thoughts.