If you want to be good, all you've got to do is be good.
We're in the transition between birth and death. But the one that people often know about is the transition between the moment of death and whatever comes next, so reincarnation or heaven or hell.
My artistic approach is that you're supposed to be a little baffled.
Someone told me once - I mean I said, "Is it ok that I don't really know what the three-act structure is?" And he said, "It's basically: Act 1: a guy climbs up a tree; Act 2: people come and throw stuff at him; Act 3: he gets down."
I think the trick of being a writer is to basically put your cards out there all the time and be willing to be as in the dark about what happens next as your reader would be at that time. And then you can really surprise yourself. There's that cliche, "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader!"
I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil." I think even like Saddam Hussein or Hitler would wake up and say, "I think it's going to be a good day. I'm gonna do some really important work." And given their definition of good, they went out and did horrible things.
If I'm writing a story and you're reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process. And how does that happen? Well, it happens when I know more than you do, and when I know that I know more than you do, and I'm holding it back from you. So that I can then manipulate you at the end. You know, you think about like in a dating situation how terrible that would be, it's the same thing with a book.
You didn't plan to write a story; it just happened. Well, it could be argued that the next thing you should do is find a hole to dig. Right? So you start digging a hole and then somebody brings a body along and puts it in. That's what a story must feel like to me. It's not that you say, "I want to write a story about a gravedigger." But you're walking along and "I don't know what I'm doing here in this story,' and - boop! a shovel. "Oh, interesting. Ok, what does one do with a shovel? Digs a hole. Why? I don't know yet. Dig the hole! Oh, look a body."
I think that feels like it to me. I mean whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it.
Every writer knows that when you're imitating somebody - you know, you're sounding like Faulkner - you're doing pretty good, but your life in Hoboken isn't Faulkneresque. So you get that kind of shortfall between the actual experience of the writer and the things he's hungry to express and the voice itself.
You don't want to spend your life writing about stuff that doesn't matter. You want to try to pull out of the temporal mediocre and write in a way that is meaningful to everybody. This goes back to this idea of being intimate with your reader. Since we're all down here and we're all dying and aspiring and loving and feeling inadequate, all these things that we all are doing all the time, what a relief it is, when somebody looks at you and says, "Yeah, me too."
That underscored this idea that when we're reading a book or writing a book, you're in an act of co-creation. The reader and the writer are both trying to dress up and present their best selves and then there's that moment, when suddenly, as a reader, you're not exactly you anymore, and likewise, as a writer, you're not really you.
All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.
My mind goes really quickly and I tend to talk really fast, as you've probably heard, I sometimes lose track of my syntax, as I'm talking that fast. The only thing I try to do, well, it's slow down, but also I do something when I'm reading that's similar to when I'm writing a section, which is to really try to imagine you on the other side, in a certain way, as an intelligent, sympathetic presence who's rooting for me to tell you a good story.
It seemed to me, in some way, especially when you're looking back at distant historical events, the "Truth" with a capital "T" is kind of the juxtaposition of all the many, many, many truths that seem true to people at the time.
Of course there's objective truth, but when we're looking at people's accounts of it, it seems the real truth lies in the accretion of all these different versions.
One of the principals of composition, I would say, in fiction, is you want to do what you can do a lot of. You want to do what you're enthusiastic about and what rings your bell. In this case, almost every decision I made was on that basis.
I came to writing kind of late. I was an engineer, and the one thing I've learned is that you have to steer a project in the direction of the maximum fun for you. You could say lively energy, or you have to try to be intrigued. Basically, if you were a musician and you were playing joylessly, nobody would want to hear you.
One lesson I learned the hard way, early in my career, was that if I tried to write to be smart or to convey a theme or from some existing plan, the result was usually pretty boring. My intuitive move, whenever I'm considering writing something, is to steer towards what feels enjoyable. Another way of saying it is, you just try to avoid the "sucky." If you start to think of a story and a way to tell it, and your reaction is kind of like, Ugh, that's going to be hard, then you don't want to do that.
I know this will sound naïve, but I often wonder what America would be like if our national ethos was simply to minimize suffering. Period. To try, every day, to convert our wonderful wealth and national energy into the cessation of suffering wherever we find it. Imagine if that was our national mindset. Well, we can-we must-dream.
Art is not some inessential frippery - it is the nation's means of intelligently regarding itself. To cripple or stigmatize the arts is to doom one's nation to a life of incuriosity, dullness, literalness and the worst kind of rank materialism.
I think we need leadership that can gently and with affection remind us of what we Americans mostly agree upon: civility, kindness, tolerance, humour, et cetera. The current Trump administration seems to thrive on trying to enforce a very odd, fearful agenda, that it tries to disguise in a false garment of fondness for the working-class - despite the fact that its policies seem designed to continue the decades-long habit of marginalizing that group.
A country doesn't need a businessman to run it: it needs a heartful, worldly, compassionate leader.
As much as we - in a revisionist way - tell ourselves that we've always been a righteous country with a couple of swerves off the path, we need to look back and see that we've always also been a racist country and have had a tendency towards banal aggressiveness. The thing that's alarming is not so much that a few people in America at the top are initiating these crazy policies, but that the middle is willing to go there too. There's a strange movement of the middle to this position of banal aggressiveness.
I know what it feels like to be in that middle and lower-middle class, and feel like the culture is passing you by; it translates into a great sense of personal frustration that can then morph into political frustration.
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