No, I’m never worried that I’m going to forget anything from a previous draft. It’s not that I don’t forget good things, but I think that often we fetishize what has been done to the detriment of the larger design. I think sometimes we fall in love with a paragraph, even a chapter or a character, and ultimately, those things don’t necessarily add to the book at hand. I actually see it as this beautiful process of almost whittling away. I know it seems counterintuitive, but if I do remember something and it does come into the book in the next draft and I never look at my previous draft, then it probably deserves to be there.

There were things that I wanted to add. Things that I wanted to take out. Things I wanted to correct. Things had changed for me as a writer, as an author, as a thinker.

Not that important. I seem to rewrite in my head a great deal. I write in these English ruled notebooks. So I write on the right, and then I correct on the left. Then, when it’s typed out, I even make another correction, and then maybe in the typed sheets also. But not that much. I seem to have a great facility to go right into what I want to say. I do correct, but not like Balzac, who went crazy over the printing presses. He was correcting at the last minute.

The concept typically comes first. Those are the lightbulb moments, the most muse-y ones. For my first book, it was the idea of this uneasy trio involved in dream research, a romantic couple and their professor. For my second book, I knew that four siblings would visit a fortune teller, who tells them their dates of death (or so she claims), and that the book would then follow the siblings over the course of their lives. And for this new book, there were two threads—one was a fascinating (real!) science experiment that was producing results with eerie implications. And the second thread was my desire to explore the universe of marriage, or partnership.

My half measures are really not good measures.

Beyond that, editing an anthology gives me a chance to find a few new readers for my colleagues’ excellent work.

I used to tell Kristina, “I choose to be married to you every day.”

Don’t read your reviews. […] Don’t write reviews. (Your judgment’s always tainted.) […] Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)

Well, I make the magic wherever I can. I don’t know if that’s conscious or accidental.

It brings the freedom of having seen a lot of things and survived them.