Rarely do I feel like I have everything I need to finish. If I did something alone, I’m skeptical if no one else has touched it. I’m already like, “Am I good enough to do what I just did? I like it, but maybe I’m wrong.” I’ll take it to the people in my creative world and ask them what they think of it. At that point, one of two things will happen. I’ll be like, “Fuck y’all, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” and that’s when I know it’s done.

In order to end up with anything you can use, you have to excavate a whole bunch of stuff you can’t use, and get it all out of your system, and then go back later and chip away at all the terrible stuff that you’ve uncovered, and find the things that go together, ideas that go together, and motifs that feel like they keep coming up; and then, reassemble a piece of writing that way. That’s also what I do for my own stuff.

In the same way that I’m rigid about my routine, I’m very rigid about how editing works. I like to start at the top. I can’t write the fourth session before I write the first. I basically have to write it in order, and I can’t really do rough drafts. I have to like the first section, and the shape it’s in before I move to the second one. So basically, everyday I just start at the top, and go down, and hopefully I get further and further down every day. But I generally can’t start in the middle, or be like, “Eh, that section’s a little wonky, but I’ll get back to it.” I kind of need to shore it up, and edit it, and polish it as I go along. And then you give it to an editor, and you start all over again.

I like to write onstage. I like to say a funny thing that happened to me out loud and see if any part of it gets a laugh, then take the little moment that got the laugh and expand on it. I wish I was a more studious person. I have drawers full of notebooks filled with random sentences. In one I found a note that said, ‘wet lettuce.’ That’s it. What about it? What about wet lettuce? I know that I don’t like it, but where is the joke?!

Don’t write in public places. In the early 1990s I went to live in Paris. The usual writerly reasons: back then, if you were caught writing in a pub in England, you could get your head kicked in, whereas in Paris, dans les cafés . . . Since then I’ve developed an aversion to writing in public. I now think it should be done only in private, like any other lavatorial activity.

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I’m bunking off from something.