It's A Big World, And I Really

It's One Thing To Be A Perfectionist When You're Alone, But When You're Trying To Make It Work In An Ensemble That's A Whole Different Deal.

It Is Very Easy For Us To Go, You Know, "i Am Being Cruel To Be Kind," When Really We Are Just ... Being Cruel. Because It Makes Us Feel Big, Or Whatever.

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.

There Was One Sequence Of Days [making Lincoln In The Bardo] When I Had Halfway Decided To Use The Historical Nuggets, But I Wasn't Quite Sure It Would Work. I'd Be In My Room For Six Or Seven Hours, Cutting Up Bits Of Paper With Quotes And Arranging Them On The Floor, With This Little Voice In My Head Saying, "hey, This Isn't Writing!" But At The End Of That Day, I Felt That The Resulting Section Was Doing Important Emotional Work

When I Wrote That [donald] Trump Piece, I Had This Uncomfortable Experience Of Sensing A Lot Of Things That Were Nascent, That I Couldn't Quite Articulate. And One Of Them Was This Move Toward Anti-intellectualism. An Anti-love Move, Even.