Actually, I had done what I thought was more or less a finished version of The Remains of the Day , but the very buttoned-up narrator, the butler — in that earlier version, he doesn’t quite come through confessing his true emotions. He maintains his front a little bit more effectively than he does in the final version. What made me change my mind was that, between that penultimate version and the final version I handed in, I listened to a song by Tom Waits — another great singer-songwriter, remarkable artist. And this is the power of that art form: it’s performance as well as the actual writing.

I think this contrast marks the main source of suffering for any creative in any field. The crazy thing is, I wrote a book about it, and it still happens to me all the time. It’s like raising kids or moving somewhere–after a while you forget how hard it really was. You look at your body of work, and you know all too well how exhausting those individual pieces were, but after a while, finished pieces get a sense of authority. They loom over you all monolithically and perfect, and leave you thinking, “Damn, last year you still had it.” But deep down you know how desperately you sat in front of the page and had no idea where the journey would take you. But now you’re stuck with the results, standing there all confidently, glaring at you. It’s easy to despair over that.

Working in 3D environments allows me to have a lot more latitude in how I create my projects, but it actually creates a much harder editing process. Since entire scenes are scripted and key-framed you can endlessly revisit and modify everything. In a sort of post-photographic sense, it’s like having a perpetual decisive moment. I’m working with virtual cameras and lighting quite often, and it is a major challenge to pare down the process to best fit the goals of the project.

That’s something that every writer and probably every artist needs to figure out for themselves: at what point in their process to bring other eyes in, because it can be tricky to do it too soon. I am very susceptible to other people’s perspectives. I’m a Libra, I’m a woman. If someone else has a convincing point of view, it’s really easy for me to get onboard with it, and that can be threatening to my own vision for my work. I need to wait until my work has reached a certain integrity and I know what the skeleton and the foundation and the general thrust of it is.