But It Was Another Girl, Young And

I Felt More Doubtful Than Usual With 'goon Squad,' Because I Knew That The Book's Genre Wasn't Easily Named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - And I Worried That Its Lack Of A Clear Category Would Count Against It. My Hopes For It Were Pretty Modest.

I Write My First Draft By Hand, At Least For Fiction. For Non-fiction, I Write Happily On A Computer, But For Fiction I Write By Hand, Because I'm Trying To Achieve A Kind Of Thoughtless State, Or An Unconscious Instinctive State. I'm Not Reading What I Write When I Wrote. It's An Unconscious Outpouring That's A Mess, And It's Many, Many Steps Away From Anything Anyone Would Want To Read. Creating That Way Seems To Generate The Most Interesting Material For Me To Work With, Though.

Redemption, Transformation--god How She Wanted These Things. Every Day, Every Minute. Didn't Everyone?

A Swell Of Gratitude And Appreciation For His Assistant, As Opposed To The Murderous Rage He Felt Toward The Rest Of His Staff

The Average Person Might Articulate Them Differently, But We All Think About Interpersonal Relationships In One Way Or Another. Writers Just Express That In Different Ways And Capture It In Different Ways. To Some Degree, We're All Thinking About The Same Things. It's The Zeitgeist. The Trick, In A Way, As A Writer, Is To Hope That Your Interests In Some Sense Link Up With The Culture Around You.