No, I’m never worried that I’m going to forget anything from a previous draft. It’s not that I don’t forget good things, but I think that often we fetishize what has been done to the detriment of the larger design. I think sometimes we fall in love with a paragraph, even a chapter or a character, and ultimately, those things don’t necessarily add to the book at hand. I actually see it as this beautiful process of almost whittling away. I know it seems counterintuitive, but if I do remember something and it does come into the book in the next draft and I never look at my previous draft, then it probably deserves to be there.

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.

It all depends. I attack and then keep attacking them until they tell a story and maybe it’s boring or discordant or I’m not interested in that story anymore, so then I put them away. Sometimes for a year. And then I take them back out and if I disagree with something strongly it’s kind of exciting because I can really be loose on the canvas. When I’ve worked on something for years there are moments where it could be a little scary to be so loose, because you’re destroying so many hours of work. But I think that’s why when I’m a little delirious in the middle of the night the magic happens, or it doesn’t. So sometimes I then work toward building different parts of the painting, and then there’s a new story. If it doesn’t have a story to tell, I’d eventually declare it’s a dead painting. In which case, a la poubelle , to the garbage.

I love editing probably more than I love writing. Writing does feel in many ways like I’m making mud or making clay, material that I then, in the editing process, can shape and make into whatever I want it to be. But, until I make that mud or whatever, there’s nothing else I can make. After finishing a rough draft, I go back and start rewriting oftentimes within the draft, which is kind of a bad habit because it means that I’ll take more shortcuts. With the first novel, I started to do something that I think I’ll do forever because I love it so much, which is reading out loud. I probably read my novel out loud like six to 10 times.