I’m still working on it, especially with poems, The only way I’ve found to do any sort of editing is to rewrite or retype the whole thing. It’s a trick my friend Bud Smith taught me. The Bud Smith secret. All his secrets are just basically, you gotta do the thing. And that really worked for fiction. That’s how I redrafted my novel. Because it’s more than a room. It’s a giant city of rooms. With a poem, I think what’s fun in the revision process is just going through, cutting out a line, cutting out four lines, and seeing what happens.

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 just write whatever comes to mind, and I tell myself that nobody is going to see this. Just get it all down. That first draft that I did in six weeks, I wouldn’t even call that a first draft. I would call it the ugly draft, the draft that you arrive at before you call it a first draft. And everything is wrong with it. There’s no clear idea of voice or character. I’m just in there trying to find the feeling, like what do I want this work to feel like when I get it done? And to see the material that I’m interested in.

I did a round of edits on my own, a round of edits with my agents before we sent it out, and then there’s obviously the round of edits with my editor. Each time I was focused on structural things first. I think the structural stuff was almost more straightforward because it would literally be something like, “There’s not a lot of background on this character.” And so then I’d go in and see, “Oh, maybe it’s just this one chapter that needs to be looked at over the course of two months.” And then I would make a to-do list of other things. And then at the end of fixing all these almost different parts of the car, we’d go in and do this total body scan. We’d read through the whole thing and have another little to-do checklist. So, it’s sort of constantly looking at the list, reading a few pages, looking at the list, and trying to do a more comprehensive edit that way.

I'm a lazy writer. My idea of heaven is not writing. On the other hand, I'm obviously compulsive about it.

You're so nice. You're not good, you're not bad, You're just nice. I'm not good, I'm not nice, I'm just right. I'm the witch. You're the world.

Musicals are plays, but the last collaborator is your audience, so you've got to wait 'til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration.

One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.

All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.

No. Although I have to qualify that. Though he was, by jazz standards, a very square composer, he was, by musical theater standards, a not square composer, and he taught me to be less square. I tend to be square.