It all depends. I attack and then keep attacking them until they tell a story and maybe it’s boring or discordant or I’m not interested in that story anymore, so then I put them away. Sometimes for a year. And then I take them back out and if I disagree with something strongly it’s kind of exciting because I can really be loose on the canvas. When I’ve worked on something for years there are moments where it could be a little scary to be so loose, because you’re destroying so many hours of work. But I think that’s why when I’m a little delirious in the middle of the night the magic happens, or it doesn’t. So sometimes I then work toward building different parts of the painting, and then there’s a new story. If it doesn’t have a story to tell, I’d eventually declare it’s a dead painting. In which case, a la poubelle , to the garbage.

Rarely do I feel like I have everything I need to finish. If I did something alone, I’m skeptical if no one else has touched it. I’m already like, “Am I good enough to do what I just did? I like it, but maybe I’m wrong.” I’ll take it to the people in my creative world and ask them what they think of it. At that point, one of two things will happen. I’ll be like, “Fuck y’all, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” and that’s when I know it’s done.

That’s something that every writer and probably every artist needs to figure out for themselves: at what point in their process to bring other eyes in, because it can be tricky to do it too soon. I am very susceptible to other people’s perspectives. I’m a Libra, I’m a woman. If someone else has a convincing point of view, it’s really easy for me to get onboard with it, and that can be threatening to my own vision for my work. I need to wait until my work has reached a certain integrity and I know what the skeleton and the foundation and the general thrust of it is.

So I use the first draft purely as a frame on which to build the actual story. So a lot of my writing is done through rewriting. And I don’t become discouraged by the notion that my first draft is not going to win any prizes or that it’s not going to be — I understand that it’s going to be lousy, but I want all of the essential elements to be there. The heart of the story has to be in that first draft, and then I can use that to create something and discover things about the story. When I wrote, for instance, The Kite Runner , there were a lot of things in that first draft that stayed, but some things in that first draft were tossed, and the transformation in some passages were very dramatic. I wrote an entire draft where the two kids were not brothers, and it really wasn’t until a subsequent draft when I realized that the kids, suddenly the idea came — well, what if the kids are brothers, and that changed the whole tone of the story. And when I rewrote it, writing it with that knowledge, it changed everything. And so you can get discouraged. Writing is largely about rewriting, and I abhor writing the first draft. I love writing subsequent drafts because that’s when I can see the story getting closer and closer to what I intended and what my original hopes for it were.