Only Keep Still, Wait, And

If You're Going To Immerse Yourself In A Project For Three Years, Why Not Stake Out A Chunk Of The World That Is Completely Alien To You And Go Traveling?

Time Passes, As The Novelist Says. The Single Most Useful Trick Of Fiction For Our Repair And Refreshment: The Defeat Of Time. A Century Of Family Saga And A Ride Up An Escalator Can Take The Same Number Of Pages. Fiction Sets Any Conversion Rate, Then Changes It In A Syllable. The Narrator’s Mother Carries Her Child Up The Stairs And The Reader Follows, For Days. But World War I Passes In A Paragraph. I Needed 125 Pages To Get From Labor Day To Christmas Vacation. In Six More Words, Here’s Spring.

The Midwest Is Such A Tabula Rasa.

Out Of Grad School, I Worked As A Tech Writer For A While Before Going Into Computer Coding For A Living.

This Idea That A Book Can Either Be About Character And Feeling, Or About Politics And Idea, Is Just A False Binary. Ideas Are An Expression Of The Feelings And The Intense Emotions We Hold About The World.