I can tell you exactly and this is a really good lesson that I had to learn. The song gets sent in some format or another, and I add to it what I think is mine to add to flesh out what was being sent. At a certain point what I’ve noticed is if I get into this space where I think “Oh and I need to add this and then I need to add that,” which is not really coming from the song, but from my own ego. I don’t mean that in a negative way, but just it’s just coming from me, it’s not the impulse of the music itself, then inevitably it starts sounding terrible to my ears. I’ve lost a couple pieces because of that. My motto is to try to stay very sensitive to when the piece is expressing what it came to express, and that I have augmented to make sure that it can be understood, but that I haven’t taken it off some place that it had no intention of going.

For me, especially with this last book, I had nothing else to say about these characters from this point in their lives. I felt like I’d reached the end of what they’re telling me—it wasn’t even what they’re telling the story, it’s more what versions of them I needed at that time.

Something is never done. If time and money and deadlines were no object, people would tweak until the cows came home. Ultimately, I would like to think something is done when I master it and I send it off and I’m so stoked about it. I feel like, “Wow, I really brought this one home.” And then I get the same feedback from the artist, that it is just beyond their imagination. Where it comes back to them, and they get excited about the mixes again. Or if there was something they were worried about, and it gets addressed and sounds better than they would’ve thought.

That’s a really good question. I don’t think you ever know; you just have to make a call. Finishing is acknowledging that there’s no further progress to be made at the current juncture. If you sit on a song for 20 years and come back to it with all the wisdom of your life, you could probably write a better song, but objectively, you have to get it out into the world in order to continue to live as an artist. So, there’s a sense of: “well, this is as good as it’s gonna get for me at my level right now.” Sometimes you realize that early, but it can take a long time. I think deadlines were invented by God to make art possible. I don’t think I could finish anything without a deadline, self-imposed or external. With the book, it was just: these people at Penguin, they don’t know me. They have no idea that I can’t do this. I have to do it because otherwise they’ll know that I can’t do it.

In my own life I think there are times when I’m not in the mood to write, but I don’t consider that to be writer’s block. If I really don’t want to enter my own book in progress, I’ll try to think about why and find a way around that. So I start from the beginning cleaning it up. Almost treat it like it’s a messy room and clean it up. Or if there’s a scene that I don’t want to write because it bums me out, maybe I’ll just work on a different scene and come back to it. Or I’m having trouble writing because I haven’t done enough research. So I go do the research. I try to troubleshoot, or figure out what the underlying reason is.

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.