Well, I can’t really work any miracles in revision , like some people can. I don’t always advocate this to students, but I don’t really have a problem just putting something aside. I don’t actually throw it away, because I have the file, but just saying, “You know what, this is not savable. It’s just not interesting to me.” I’m not someone who can systematically chip away at something that’s dead and make it better. I’ll sometimes break things down into parts and think, “Well, this was a 25-page story and it’s just really bad, but there’s a page and a half here that I could sort of use in something one day.” Revision for me is really only something I can get excited about if I can make something better.

So I use the first draft purely as a frame on which to build the actual story. So a lot of my writing is done through rewriting. And I don’t become discouraged by the notion that my first draft is not going to win any prizes or that it’s not going to be — I understand that it’s going to be lousy, but I want all of the essential elements to be there. The heart of the story has to be in that first draft, and then I can use that to create something and discover things about the story. When I wrote, for instance, The Kite Runner , there were a lot of things in that first draft that stayed, but some things in that first draft were tossed, and the transformation in some passages were very dramatic. I wrote an entire draft where the two kids were not brothers, and it really wasn’t until a subsequent draft when I realized that the kids, suddenly the idea came — well, what if the kids are brothers, and that changed the whole tone of the story. And when I rewrote it, writing it with that knowledge, it changed everything. And so you can get discouraged. Writing is largely about rewriting, and I abhor writing the first draft. I love writing subsequent drafts because that’s when I can see the story getting closer and closer to what I intended and what my original hopes for it were.

Monday to Friday, very, very industriously from ten in the morning ’til about six in the evening, I just sat and wrote, and revised and revised, and wrote.

Because I have to read everything I write and edit it. So I’m not a natural writer. She’s more a natural writer than I am. But I can do what I need to do to give myself enough time to write papers, edit them, before I turn them in.  And that’s what I still do.

I was jealous as hell.

I’ve been reading – and fighting – Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts; feeling admiration and anger in equal parts.

I wrote a play called Knuckle in 1974, which opened to hostile reviews during the three-day week.

There is an awful lot of pious theatre at the moment, where you go to have what you already believed reinforced.

I get to airports ridiculously early. It’s an uncontrollable urge.

Not reading medicine.