I take a break. I need some distance, and then I start getting edits. Generally they’re pretty macro at the beginning. I work with an editor here in Canada and another at FSG. They’re truly brilliant, and they pose the initial questions, again, on a macro scale. They pose, I mull, and then basically re-enter the work and try to… I keep talking about aliveness, but I realize that’s the central point with this book. It’s like I try to preserve the aliveness while engaging with their queries about what can be built out, what might not be as clear to the reader as it is in my head. All of that very subtle, hyper-intelligent work that editors do, the way they inhabit the work and illuminate it for you—it sounds like an act of mercy which on many levels it is.

The concept typically comes first. Those are the lightbulb moments, the most muse-y ones. For my first book, it was the idea of this uneasy trio involved in dream research, a romantic couple and their professor. For my second book, I knew that four siblings would visit a fortune teller, who tells them their dates of death (or so she claims), and that the book would then follow the siblings over the course of their lives. And for this new book, there were two threads—one was a fascinating (real!) science experiment that was producing results with eerie implications. And the second thread was my desire to explore the universe of marriage, or partnership.

There were things that I wanted to add. Things that I wanted to take out. Things I wanted to correct. Things had changed for me as a writer, as an author, as a thinker.

It’s arduous and time consuming. A sentence can be revised ad nauseam forever. If you know what needs to happen in a scene, you may be revising that for a while to get the language right, but you’re creating the whole time. With drawing it’s different. If I storyboard something and I know, for example, that in this picture I’m going to draw myself with my feet up on my desk, talking on the phone, as I am now, I can see that exactly in my mind. Then I just have to spend the hours to put it on the paper… but that takes much longer than revising the sentences.