The House Is A Factory.

Well, My Background Is Journalism. I Don't Have Any Creative-writing Experience Except For One Class I Took As A Sophomore In College.

I Always Had A Hard Time With Fiction. It Does Feel Like Driving A Car In A Clown Suit. You're Going Somewhere, But You're In Costume, And You're Not Really Fooling Anybody. You're The Guy In Costume, And Everybody's Supposed To Forget That And Go Along With You. Obviously, It Can Work, It Works All The Time - Well, It Doesn't Always Work. Still, No Matter What, I'm Always Looking At The Form And Addressing It, Not Ignoring It.

Maybe He Hadn't Thought The War Through. It Had Seemed Like Simple Fun When He Had First Pictured It, With A Glorious Beginning, A Difficult But Valor-filled Middle, And A Victorious End. He Hadn't Accounted For The Fact That There Might Not Be Much Of A Resolution To The Battle, And He Hadn't Imagined What It Would Feel Like When The War Just Sort Of Ended, Without Anyone Admitting Defeat And Congratulating Him For His Bravery.

Then He Got More Books. He Saved All The Books.

The Weird Thing Is That Working Within An Established Story Was Actually Kind Of Liberating. You Know The Beginning And Middle And End, More Or Less, So There's Less Pressure To Figure All That Out.