Expecting A Novel To Bear The Weight

If You Read The Biographies Of People Who Have Written Good Books, You Often See The Point Where They Suddenly Come Into Themselves, And Those Weeks In The Spring Of 1997 Were When I Came Into Myself As A Writer. They Feel Like Some Of The Best Weeks Of Writing I’ll Ever Have. The Discovery That I Could Write Better About Something As Trivial As An Ordinary Family Dinner Than I Could About The Exploding Prison Population Of The United States, And The Corporatization Of American Life, And All The Other Things I’d Been Trying To Do, Was A Real Revelation.

Deploring Other People--their Lack Of Perfection--had Always Been Our Sport.

To Me, The Point Of A Novel Is To Take You To A Still Place. You Can Multitask With A Lot Of Things, But You Can’t Really Multitask Reading A Book.

I Wrote Two Plotted Books, Got Some Of The Fundamentals Of Storytelling Down, Then... It's Sort Of Like Taking The Training Wheels Off, Trying To Write A Book That's Fun In The Same Way Without Relying On Quite Such Mechanical Or External Beats.

So, What, You Got Cigarette Burns, Too?" Gitanes Said. Chip Showed His Palm, "it's Nothing." "self-inflicted. You Pathetic American." "different Kind Of Prison" Chip Said.