I sold a book six years after I left an MFA program. In between, there was a lot of endurance of poverty and a lot of fighting off doubt. It's all a part of the process of being or becoming a writer.

A lot of my close friends had tolerantly washed their hands of the whole idea of me writing a book. They had said to themselves, "I don't know what he's doing."

I tended to write the book in these bursts of two or three months at a time. So I would know, or at least feel securely, that for the next few months I was at least going to have a few hours a day.

For me, the process always has to be pretty intense. I could never write just two or three days a week. It had to be every day.

For many years I didn't have health insurance.

I think that it is very interesting to write about a team because a team is a group of people who work in very close quarters and have very intense relationships so - in my days of playing sports, I was very rarely on a team that did not have it's own peculiar dynamic, and you wind up having very intense feelings for good and for bad about these people with whom you spend many hours a day.

I feel like every time I start up, it's like a truck you have to get into 15th gear, so you very solely crank into that mental space where you feel really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go.