It’s different for every project for me. Books are a combination of character, plot, and setting. And every book I write, I could point out and say, oh, there was the first idea . Usually they’re growing separately , a couple ideas for the plot, a couple seeds for characters. An idea for a magic system or a governmental structure. Those will be growing independently in my notes file. I know I have a book when these different elements start to meld together in my brain, and change each other in interesting ways. I’ll start to say, all right, these two ideas belong together. Here’s this character who belongs in this plot. Is there a setting that I’ve been developing that also enhances this?

A little of both. Sometimes I have a skeleton of something. For both essays and poems, the conception process is very similar. So there definitely were some essays that started as poems. It’s just about realizing what the best container is for the thought. Sometimes I need more of an argument, even if it’s an argument with myself, but what’s cool is that I can think about utilizing those techniques no matter what form. It’s about exercising, learning how an essay thinks, and then being able to apply that to a poem if I need to or want to.

I write mostly in my bedroom. I don’t have a desk. I have at least 10 or 12 books that I’m reading at the time around me and I flip through different things. I have poems that I’m reading on my computer and I flip through those. I usually start by journaling. I journal every night, and that’s where most of my poems come from. Or notes in my phone that I pick through and Frankenstein morph into poems. In the end, it’s just me trying to boil down my gibberish and self-recriminations into some destruction and rebirth of me trying to give flesh to my memories.

Concepts can be really freeing in their limitations. I really enjoy when I make rules for myself in my creative practice. Whether that means I’m going to try and write a song without the use of the word “I,” I like having rules in my songs. Even if I don’t follow them exactly, it’s kind of nice to have a very loose guideline. And then when I try to create that universe for myself, I at least can visualize the path that I’m trying to follow.

It’s best to start writing when you wake up in the morning, or afternoon, or whenever it is you wake up. Just start then, because you are closer to the dream state than at any other time in the day, which means the imagination is really working on all cylinders, and it means that whatever it is that manufactures sentences in your head is very fresh, and you have all kinds of slants on things that by the end of the day you won’t have, or you will just lose along the way. Further advice I have not.

I wrote a little book called Screening History , in which I go in great detail into the movies that affected me growing up. This was in the years of puberty, and so on. The Prince and the Pauper , based on Mark Twain’s novel with the Mauch twins in it. All of the propaganda films I loved, because they were political.