When I’m exhausted with it, you know, when my obsession with the thing becomes diluted and I want to do something else. [Or] having created a sufficient mess… where I can’t add anymore, I need to peel back. And then, of course I am lucky enough to have an editor, to turn a project loose and then we’ll go from there. It’s different for every project. No book that I have written has taught me how to write the next one. I feel like a baby every time I start a new book. Like I’ve never done this before, and I have to figure it out from scratch each time.

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.

I don’t know if they ever really are. I mean, there are often works that you make for a particular moment and then maybe the next time you show them, you show them in a slightly different way so that they become more precise or more communicative. So they’re constantly evolving. Also, when you stick one work next to another work, suddenly it has a new resonance. You could almost argue that, in that new context, it’s a new work again. So I don’t know if you ever really finish anything.

It’s paying attention to the energy of the piece. If it feels really distant from me, I know that there’s an irreconcilable problem between me and the work, and I need to just put it to the side until it wants to come back to me. If I wake up really excited to work on something, then it’s still present in me. If not, I put it to the side without fearing, because often those things come back much, much better a decade or two decades later. It’s really allowing the work not to just be the work at hand, but the longer process of making something, making a life and making a life in art. So, knowing that even if this story, I tried to do this story when I was 19 and it didn’t work and I kept trying 26 and then 34 and then 42.