At first I’ll think of stuff in my head for a while. The more I think of an idea, the more promising it is— it just naturally occupies space in my brain. Then I start making notes with pen and paper. If it’s a story, it’s more like a moment, or just it’s kind of a more fleeting idea. And if it’s a novel, it’s something that I can see approaching in a lot of different ways, and sticking with for two or three years. I might write a scene or two and just kind of see how it feels. Then I will type an outline. That’s when I really feel like I have a path forward, even though I don’t feel like I have to stick to the outline, but it is very reassuring to me to have it.

I think it begins as a kind of tension in space.  There’s something out there and it’s waiting for the big bang, and I have to get that into my head.  I have a composer friend in Ireland, and he beautifully said, “I have this scream in my head and I have to get it into the orchestra.  I have to get it into the music.”  But I wouldn’t be quite as dramatic as that.  But I have this tension.  I have this thing that has to be done. And the problem is, you see, once you’ve got the first paragraph down and you’ve got the tone, then the bloody book is written.  All you have to do is fill it in then, which makes it really boring.  I mean I’d like to be like one of those Japanese artists, you know, just go shoop ! and it’s done.  But no, it takes years.

I write mostly in my bedroom. I don’t have a desk. I have at least 10 or 12 books that I’m reading at the time around me and I flip through different things. I have poems that I’m reading on my computer and I flip through those. I usually start by journaling. I journal every night, and that’s where most of my poems come from. Or notes in my phone that I pick through and Frankenstein morph into poems. In the end, it’s just me trying to boil down my gibberish and self-recriminations into some destruction and rebirth of me trying to give flesh to my memories.

The starting process has changed over time. I go back and forth from knowing exactly where I want to place the central figure and doing that first and committing to her and then building the world around her. But more recently, between the body of work I did last year and what I’m working on now, I’ve started to commit to building up the background layers slowly. Putting a wash down and building up a lot of different transparent layers that have their own energies, and then starting to rip that energy apart to then create a new form or a new structure. That language, in general, is also what this is about. Ripping and expanding, shedding and rebuilding, that push and pull of building the surface so that she has this foundation and that it feels like a more consonant structure. I’m liking that relationship to the work.

Well, art is never finished, it’s only abandoned, right? That famous quote. A project is done when I feel that I can’t make significant improvements to the story, I’m only going to start taking sideways steps. If I revise it, it doesn’t get better, it just gets different.