I print every draft out even if it’s like seven things I want to change and then I type it all back into the computer sentence by sentence so that every single one is good and I’ll mumble them to myself as I’m doing that to make sure they sound okay.

D.H. Lawrence wrote several complete versions of Sons And Lovers and The Rainbow and Women in Love . I think that thing of having to begin again maybe enables you to reconceive things, completely reconceive, in a way that’s more difficult now. Now it’s just a kind of constant tampering.

I just write whatever comes to mind, and I tell myself that nobody is going to see this. Just get it all down. That first draft that I did in six weeks, I wouldn’t even call that a first draft. I would call it the ugly draft, the draft that you arrive at before you call it a first draft. And everything is wrong with it. There’s no clear idea of voice or character. I’m just in there trying to find the feeling, like what do I want this work to feel like when I get it done? And to see the material that I’m interested in.

I like to write onstage. I like to say a funny thing that happened to me out loud and see if any part of it gets a laugh, then take the little moment that got the laugh and expand on it. I wish I was a more studious person. I have drawers full of notebooks filled with random sentences. In one I found a note that said, ‘wet lettuce.’ That’s it. What about it? What about wet lettuce? I know that I don’t like it, but where is the joke?!