Goon Squad' Took About Three

I Felt More Doubtful Than Usual With 'goon Squad,' Because I Knew That The Book's Genre Wasn't Easily Named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - And I Worried That Its Lack Of A Clear Category Would Count Against It. My Hopes For It Were Pretty Modest.

Structural Dissatisfaction: Returning To Circumstances That Once Pleased You, After Having Experienced A More Thrilling Or Opulent Way Of Life, And Finding That You Can No Longer Tolerate Them.

Her Only Thought Was Of Getting Away, As If She Were Carrying A Live Grenade From Inside The House, So That When It Exploded, It Would Destroy Just Herself.

I Write My First Draft By Hand, At Least For Fiction. For Non-fiction, I Write Happily On A Computer, But For Fiction I Write By Hand, Because I'm Trying To Achieve A Kind Of Thoughtless State, Or An Unconscious Instinctive State. I'm Not Reading What I Write When I Wrote. It's An Unconscious Outpouring That's A Mess, And It's Many, Many Steps Away From Anything Anyone Would Want To Read. Creating That Way Seems To Generate The Most Interesting Material For Me To Work With, Though.

But I Always Need To Identify With A Character To Write About Him Or Her - And By "identify," I Mean See The World Through That Person's Eyes And Have A Strong Sense Of The Inner Logic Of Their Acts And Decisions, Wacky Or Wrongheaded Though They Might Be. In That Sense, I Think There's Some Of Me In All Of Them.