By The Time The Plane Was Airborne

Normally, Small Talk Is Enough For Me To Form An Opinion Of Someone. I Make Quick Judgments, Often Completely Wrong, And Then Stick By Them Rigidly.

I Wrote A Whole Novel Before The Beach. Unpublishable. Junk. But, For Some Reason I Stuck At Novels And Wrote A Second. Still Not Sure Why I Didn't Give Up. Stubborn, Maybe.

My First Attempt At Writing Was Very Unstructured And Formless, With Shifting Points Of View. I Was Trying To Understand How Long Form Might Work, And I Realized I Had Something Shapeless. It Was A Total Car Wreck. But I Still Felt I Could Pull It Off. So I Ditched That Attempt And Started Writing In The Opposite Manner, In First Person, With A Driving Narrative.

I Never Feel A Huge Need For Backstory In My Novels Or Films. Quick Sketches Are Often Enough. When You Encounter People In Life - Like A Chance Encounter At A Bar Or Wherever You Happen To Be - You Make These Incredibly Quick, Quite Intricate Decisions About People Based On Very Small Amounts Of Coded Information. We're Good At That. Long Descriptions Prior To Meeting Someone Or As You're Getting To Know Them Almost Don't Work.

When You Develop An Infatuation For Someone You Always Find A Reason To Believe That This Is Exactly The Person For You. It Doesn’t Need To Be A Good Reason. Taking Photographs Of The Night Sky, For Example. Now, In The Long Run, That’s Just The Kind Of Dumb, Irritating Habit That Would Cause You To Split Up. But In The Haze Of Infatuation, It’s Just What You’ve Been Searching For All These Years.