John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, Flaubert and William Maxwell were all very influential when I first started writing. Now, the writers I'm most interested in are the writers who are most unlike me: for example, Denis Johnson.
Here is what I am not going to do: I am not going to go to a restaurant, take pictures of my food, download them, and call that a blog. That is beyond the pale. The Internet is such a bazaar of self-indulgences that I don't know why that particular one should bug me so much. But it really does.
I am hopelessly devoted to paper. Nothing against e-readers of any sort - anything that keeps people reading is okay by me - but I am not, historically, an early adopter of such things.
I have no desire to write historical anything or futuristic anything - I want to find a way to get at the essence of what it's like to be alive now. The reason why great novels from centuries ago are still great is because that's what they were doing; it's like a message from another culture.
I wrote my first novel in the same conditions as most first novelists - I had a full-time job, I shared an apartment, I had no time - and so I became a compulsive outliner of everything. Ever since then, my process has consisted of trying to forcibly rid myself of that compulsion.
I'm not interested in current events per se, but I am interested in how certain aspects of social or public life that might seem ultra-contemporary actually take their place in a long American continuum.
If you look at the practice of 'crisis management,' and maybe squint at it a little, you can make out in the corners of your vision the ghosts or the vestiges of a much older, but still thoroughly American, form of public life, one centered not on public opinion but on religion.
It's nice to have something else going on when a book comes out so you're not just sitting by the phone, waiting for things to happen. You don't want to be the guy Googling himself all day.
It's not really an original idea, but there's something that goes along with power and celebrity that starts to make you feel like you're impervious to certain forces that the rest of us have to live with.
Children go from being a kind of cultural protectorate to the Junior Auxiliary of the tube-watching nation at large, and programs are designed for them on the same principle as they're designed for grown-ups: as a way to sell eyeballs to advertisers.
The don't-ask-don't-tell approach to plot and character that 'The Hurt Locker' relies on to set itself in motion doesn't offend me politically. It offends me as a storyteller.
The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.
Tween programming is so retro that the shows even have theme songs, something the quest for more commercial time drove out of prime-time television years ago.
When I read a book I liked, I would get a pen and one of my father's legal pads and rewrite it from memory as if I had thought of it myself. It was a clear sign that I wanted to be involved in writing, even if it was just pretend at that point.
When I'm composing a scene for the first time, I try to imitate my character. The less critical distance the better - particularly when they're acting badly.
Writers like to feel sorry for themselves, which is easy to do in private, but when called on to feel sorry for ourselves in social situations, we will often do so by sharing terrible book tour stories.
You never want to be in a position where your reader feels like you're passing judgment on your own characters. Any novel where you feel like the author is talking to the reader over the characters' heads is in a bad place.
That's always the most productive research - research into tone, into voice. Facts are nice, too, but facts are more raw material than creative inspiration.
'Anna Karenina.' I read it in college. I was so engrossed that I couldn't stop reading it and neglected all my other studies. I would go to the library even on nice warm weekends and just lock myself up. I think that was the first time that I felt transformed by a book.
