When I wrote 'The Pregnant Widow' three or four years ago, I tried to reread my first novel, 'The Rachel Papers,' because their young heroes are the same age. I couldn't finish it. It seemed to me so technically slapdash and weak.
My own way of writing is very meditated and, despite my reputation, rather slow-moving. So I do spend a good deal of time contemplating endings. The final ending is usually arrived at simply by intuition.
I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?
Rereading one's own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print - 'The Very Model of a Man' is the only novel of mine that has - and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous.
I wrote Report from the Interior was that after I finished Winter Journal, I took a pause, and I realized there was more I wanted to say.
It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels.
I've always relied a lot on landscape in my books, the atmosphere of a particular place, as well as a fair amount of external action. While writing 'Chance,' it occurred to me that this is the most internal book I've ever written. So much of the action takes place in Chance's head.
I never thought I would write about Chicago, and I definitely never thought I would write a drama.
I think if you write for long enough, you eventually have a problem with everything, because you start figuring out where you could be doing better. But as far back as I can trace, I always wrote clear, grammatical prose.
Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
I wrote 'Little Fires Everywhere' and sold the book in 2015, still the Obama years. The possibility of a Trump presidency was not on my radar.
The first story I wrote was called 'Days,' and I have very little affection for it.
It's possible that I've matured as a writer, and I hope I've matured emotionally, but I always find myself revisiting these adolescent scenes.
Certainly in the case of 'Kill Your Friends,' a book I wrote more than 10 years ago, I routinely meet interviewers who appear to know the book better than I do. But still, you have to talk about it.
I know that sometimes it happens that a novelist is embarrassed about their early works. For me, it's the opposite: I believe 'Durable Goods' is the best thing I've written.
I wrote about 22 plays before 'When You Cure Me,' which was staged in 2005. I occasionally get them out and have a read, thinking maybe there's a thought or an idea or even a turn of phrase that I could use for something new. There's not. They're dire.
