I Always Worry That Knowing

I Usually Have More Than One Thing I'm Working On At Once -- I've Been Working On Three Different Novels. When I Get Stuck On One, I Hop Back And Forth. It's Sort Of Freeing: I Can Say I'm Abandoning This Thing That I Hate Forever And I'm Moving On To Something That's Good. I'll Find That I'll Go Back To [the Other Project] In A Day Or A Week And Like It Again. But That Moment Of Wanting To Trash Something -- That Virginia Woolf Moment When You Have To Be Stopped From Filling Your Pocket With Stones -- Comes Pretty Regularly For Me. Switching Is Probably A Good Thing.

I Can't Understand How People Can Settle For Having Just One Life. I Remember We Were In English Class And We Were Talking About That Poem By - That One Guy. David Frost. 'two Roads Diverged In A Yellow Wood-' You Know This Poem, Right? 'two Roads Diverged In A Yellow Wood, And Sorry I Could Not Travel Both And Be One Traveler, Long I Stood And Looked Down One As Far As I Could, To Where It Bent In The Undergrowth-" "i Loved That Poem. But I Remember Thinking To Myself: Why? How Come You Can't Travel Both? That Seemed Really Unfair To Me.

I Don't Think Anybody Deals Well With Tragedy Or Grief, But Maybe My Characters Are Particularly Bad At It. Which Is Why I Love Them.

I Start With An Image, Then I Go From The Image Toward Exploring The Situation. Then I Write A Scene, And From The Scene I Find The Character, From The Character I Find The Larger Plot. It's Like Deductive Reasoning - I Start With The Smaller Stuff And Work Backward.

I've Always Been A Horror Movie Fan, Since I Was A Kid. And I Was Also A Really Scared Kid. I Was Easily Scared Of The Dark. One Of The Ways I Would Try And Get Away From My Fear Of The Dark Was To Pretend Like The Monsters Were My Friends.