Well, if you write the way I do, which means that you start something and you rewrite it, especially the beginning part, you rewrite it time and time and time again, at some point you feel, not that it’s beyond repair, but that there’s nothing more you can do to fix it. In other words, as far as you’re concerned, that’s what you were going to write.

If I’m starting from one place, I’m trying to see how far away from that place I can get on an emotional level. For example, the protagonist of Loot develops an obsession early on, so I sensed that the arc of the novel would end with a release from that obsession, in one way or another—disappointment, disillusionment, or a different kind of liberation.

I don’t know. Right now I’m just in the insecurity portion and nothing feels good enough. But I think one way that I can answer this is, if I go back to it and I have a little chuckle with myself, then I feel like it’s good. I still think it’s funny. There are some parts of this new book that I look back at and I feel mortified. There are some parts where I’m like, “Wow, this person really gets me. This me really gets me.” And it feels good. Because even though it’s me, I’m really connecting with it. And hopefully, someone else will feel that way.

I think I’m more attuned to a popular… I grew up watching MTV and listening to three-minute songs, and I also don’t like concerts that are too long. A concert can be seven hours and not be too long, but sometimes a concert is forty-five minutes and it’s too long, and you’re uncomfortable, like, “It ended fifteen minutes ago, why do you keep making sound?” Or those situations where someone is playing and they’re fading out and you have this feeling of, “Yeah, it’s ending, yes, now, definitely,” and then they start again and you say, “No!” [ Laughs ] For me, moving over an hour or so, it goes into a different territory where I lose my sense of form. And then it becomes more like the chord in space. Installation format is where I would go after an hour.

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.

I was about to answer cheesily, “It starts me,” but it actually does. I search. I put in a lot of time reading, taking notes, writing in that grasping way that feels mostly wrong. Usually it begins with an image and then the voice comes. Once I have the voice, the book presents. Annie Ernaux talked about it as channeling, and I don’t want to over romanticize it, because there’s a lot of bodily discipline that goes into the making. But I do think that, for me, that’s how a first draft feels. It’s like just keeping up with the voice in my head, being true to it, clinically so—like a pact. I love that first draft, because it’s pre-scrutiny, pre-analysis.