How does a new work begin for you?

Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics.  Why did I enjoy it?  I used to play with it.  I used to do whatever I felt like doing—it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with.

Good question. The novel began with Sten and his story, which then suggested the rest. I always follow that first line and always write organically, in sequence. This allows me to make the discoveries I need to as I progress. I don’t really concern myself with questions of which character takes precedence—again, that lies outside my purview. I see this as a kind of ensemble piece, I suppose, like the novel that precedes it, San Miguel , told from the perspective of three women.

You would think my work would be like Warhol’s and others since I have spent so much time in and around that crowd. Well, I’m not a very good modern artist in the sense that my life is not part of my art. I think that Warhol was idea-driven. He was always looking for good ideas. I’m more intuitive; I respond to what I love. I see something beautiful, and I want to paint it. That’s how I work.

Well, it’s very simple for me. It’s pretty much always the same. I might have certain things swimming around in my head. We all always do. What’s been on your mind lately? You could ask anybody that, and you’d get a couple of answers. But, I always jump in. I always just try to think of a first sentence. Well, actually, I decide firstly if it’s going to be in third person or first person. And then I just think of something, I just get something moving.

No, they are three completely different processes. In film, I try to really blank out my mind when I see the film for the first time so that I have no preconceptions. Early on in my career, I tried to do all this prep or even read the script and write music, but none of it ever survived. And I realized the best way to go at it was to be as blank as I can possibly be. When I’m writing classical music, it’s much more nerve-wracking because I’m starting with nothing! And I don’t have a picture to drive me on. I am wired now, for 38 years, that I see a moving picture, I hear music, you know what I mean? But with classical, I got nothing, and at first that was totally terrifying. But I forced myself into it, and then something develops, and it becomes very liberating. With the rock music, it’s a whole different process. I mean, I can’t do anything until I get the message.

Sometimes I start a story with just a feeling. Often it is a place or an image. A house, a tree, a mountain. A sentence or a phrase. Sometimes it is like a line of music, a tone. Sometimes it is a character. It’s happened a couple of times that I start from one of those places and work for a few days or weeks and one morning I will wake up with a sentence that makes me realize that one of my new characters could be related to one of the characters I wrote about 45 stories ago. Something in my unconscious mind will weave those people together and put them in the same place. Sometimes I find a way to cast an image or tone, attach it to a character I’ve already worked with. Something in me wants to connect layers over time… not just families but friendships over time, over generations. I think a lot about how we build community over time or place. Sometimes it seems that I can’t work on a project really hard without connecting it to this gigantic web that I constructed over the years.

I don’t begin with a material. I begin with a problem. If a material can solve that problem, then I become interested in it. Sometimes it is paper, sometimes timber, sometimes carbon fibre. There are many materials we still don’t use efficiently. I think there is always room to discover new possibilities, every project presents a different problem, and I am always thinking about how to solve it more simply, with fewer materials or a better structure. I think every material has good and bad qualities. The important thing is understanding them and using them appropriately.