It’s best to start writing when you wake up in the morning, or afternoon, or whenever it is you wake up. Just start then, because you are closer to the dream state than at any other time in the day, which means the imagination is really working on all cylinders, and it means that whatever it is that manufactures sentences in your head is very fresh, and you have all kinds of slants on things that by the end of the day you won’t have, or you will just lose along the way. Further advice I have not.

So I got this new attitude.  Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

It’s just a devotion to the greater beautiful thing that allows us all to be here. It sounds a little “woo-woo,” but basically, it’s manifested in me because I’m a writer. I get up every morning, and I write. I sit. As Paul knows, I sit. I have my notebook. I’m scribbling. “Don’t talk to me right now, honey. I’m writing.” That’s my thing. That’s how I manifest it. Someone who runs the hurdles, or a tennis player, would manifest it daily, going out there and hitting balls or whatever they do.

So, yes, it is very hard work, and there are days where there’s something I have to do in the book, something I have to learn or put myself and the characters through that I am… That makes me fearful or sorrowful. But I do think also that this aspect of writing is over reported at the expense of the pleasurable aspect as well. If writers didn’t love to be in this space between themselves and their language, they probably wouldn’t do it. You’d give up.

No, they are three completely different processes. In film, I try to really blank out my mind when I see the film for the first time so that I have no preconceptions. Early on in my career, I tried to do all this prep or even read the script and write music, but none of it ever survived. And I realized the best way to go at it was to be as blank as I can possibly be. When I’m writing classical music, it’s much more nerve-wracking because I’m starting with nothing! And I don’t have a picture to drive me on. I am wired now, for 38 years, that I see a moving picture, I hear music, you know what I mean? But with classical, I got nothing, and at first that was totally terrifying. But I forced myself into it, and then something develops, and it becomes very liberating. With the rock music, it’s a whole different process. I mean, I can’t do anything until I get the message.