What I described in 'Another Life' - about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened - is a frequent experience in a younger writer.
To this day, 'The Duke and I' remains particularly close to my heart; I felt it was the novel in which my writing took a huge leap forward.
Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.
My new novel 'Red Hook Road' began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper.
Becoming a mother cannot help but change things. An author's life is reflected in their writing, whether they want it to be or not, and parenthood is one of the biggest life changes there is.
It took me 14 years to write 'Crazy Brave' because I kept changing the form and I also kept running away from the story. I said I don't really want to write about myself. But it's about writing about memory.
Anything you write, even if you have to start over, is valuable. I let the story write itself through the characters.
Depending on what I'm working on, I come to the writing desk with entirely different mindsets. When I change form one to the other, it's as if another writer is on the scene.
I'd say that after my father passed my writing changed, it went deeper. Most would say 'matured' but I don't think I'd use that word in relation to my progress. I think 'change' is a little more accurate.
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.
I tried to reject everything I knew as a TV writer when I decided to be a novelist, and the books didn't work. Finally I realized I should go back to all the techniques I'd learned.
When I'm writing, I look like a fool because the parts are moving through me and I'm crying and laughing and making faces.
At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
I've been at writing long enough now to know that every three or four books, I have to start a new direction.
The act of writing surprises me all the time. A miraculous thing happens when you have an idea and you want to convert it into words... and then you start to create a work of art, and that's another miracle, and it remains mysterious to the writer, or to this writer anyway.
What I find is that it's the middle-aged authors who have lived a life who have the most important, interesting voices. They just need someone to give them the key to unlock the door.
My favorite thing as a performing artist is to get a pile of raw material from a writer who says, 'Will you help me make this real?' There's nothing like starting from scratch.
I always thought that I was a terrible writer. And I started to write songs. And I started to like what I was writing. I think it's a new way for me to express things that are closer to myself than when I play a role because, of course, it's really not me.
The exact day I became a poet was April 1, 1965, the day I bought my first typewriter.
I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.
By the time I was 23 or 24 and had written the first manuscript of 'The Final Winter', I knew I wanted to make it a career but didn't know how. It took me a long time to grow into myself, but when my love of writing returned, it did so with an enormous amount of venom. It is now a mainstay in my life.
I never imagined when I began writing in the early 1960s I'd become professional and my life would be transformed.
Reading Stephen King's book, On Writing, was like being cornered and forced to have a long, drawn out mental enema.
For years, I felt I was a novelist, but now I know I can write short fiction.
I wrote 'Ava Wrestles the Alligator' when I was 22 or 23. These people and that world have been evolving in me for a while. It's such a shift not to be in that world.
