Fiction Is Fun Because You Get To

Maybe It's Because I Grew Up During The Mtv Generation, But To Me A Perfect Song Is One I Can Imagine A Music Video To, A Song That Can Take You Into A Dream.

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 Still Think About The Writers I Loved When I Was A Kid.

Fiction Is A Particular Kind Of Rhetoric, A Way Of Thinking That I Think Can Be Useful In Your Life. It Asks You To Image The World Through Someone Else's Eyes, And It Allows You To Try To Empathize With Situations That You Haven't Actually Experienced.

It Doesn't Matter What You Do. In The End, You Are Going To Be Judged, And All The Times That You're Not At Your Most Dignified Are The Ones That Will Be Recalled In All Their Vivid, Heartbreaking Detail. And Then Of Course These Things Will Be Distorted And Exaggerated And Replayed Over And Over, Until Eventually They Turn Into The Essence Of You: Your Cartoon.