All of the above is the answer to that. I mean, I edit what I wrote yesterday before starting writing again today, so that’s the first sort of layer of editing. Then, suppose I have a chapter, then I’ll edit it again and again. Every word I publish has been through 30 edits. My first draft I do with a pencil. I just write freehand with a pencil. I do that for quite a while, and then I write with a pen. I make a draft with a pen. And then I get onto the computer. For me, it would be really kind of crippling if I were to go straight onto a computer. I would just freeze up. I think there’s a lot to be said for trying to find ways of not freezing up, of being able to be loose.

I love editing probably more than I love writing. Writing does feel in many ways like I’m making mud or making clay, material that I then, in the editing process, can shape and make into whatever I want it to be. But, until I make that mud or whatever, there’s nothing else I can make. After finishing a rough draft, I go back and start rewriting oftentimes within the draft, which is kind of a bad habit because it means that I’ll take more shortcuts. With the first novel, I started to do something that I think I’ll do forever because I love it so much, which is reading out loud. I probably read my novel out loud like six to 10 times.

It’s arduous and time consuming. A sentence can be revised ad nauseam forever. If you know what needs to happen in a scene, you may be revising that for a while to get the language right, but you’re creating the whole time. With drawing it’s different. If I storyboard something and I know, for example, that in this picture I’m going to draw myself with my feet up on my desk, talking on the phone, as I am now, I can see that exactly in my mind. Then I just have to spend the hours to put it on the paper… but that takes much longer than revising the sentences.

Sometimes, there will be songs [for which] I finish the lyrics years later. I try not to listen to my own music until time has passed. It’s like, “Maybe I should have put that word in there.” But I think it’s because I studied English literature, for me, the most important part, the bit I get the most out of as a consumer of music, as an enjoyer of music, is the lyrics. So for me, I really care. I try things out, I try different versions, I will sing different versions, and it’s a sort of long process [that] feels like I’m excavating dinosaur bones with a little toothbrush.

I can’t say there’s a specific place to begin when it comes to creating virtual identities, but it’s important to consider them in the longview. What stays here—in web pages, caches, and hard drives—might be the things that people retain of you in the future ahead. Where scholars might spend years studying the journals and letters of our predecessors, these personal accounts are infinitely more robust. Even if it is a private pursuit, an external drive full of personal exploration can be such a gift to those not here yet.