With Ibrahim al-Koni, what I figured out was - and you'll see this in his novels - if your time is limited, make the unit of the chapters small so that you can finish one a day, at least in the first draft. Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft. I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has been that for me.

Take Ezra Pound's translations of poetry from Chinese. He doesn't really know Chinese, and the very strange results that he comes up with aren't all successful, but as a whole it's incredibly successful, moving us away from familiar forms and indicating other forms we might think in or express in.

There were illegal poets like Muzaffar al-Nawab, this is the thing - Muzaffar was widely known and he didn't really have books. He would deliver these readings on cassette tape. Go on YouTube and listen to him. He's like a preacher. He's a really interesting figure in modern Iraqi life.

In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing. You have to attempt what they did in that language - say, in Arabic - and try to accomplish a version of that in English, and you're constantly serving two masters.

If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English.

Translation is harder, believe it or not. You do have to come up with a story, and actually I'm mystified by that process. I don't exactly know how the story just comes, but it does. But in writing a story that you're inventing, versus writing a story that somebody else has made up - there's a world of difference. In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing.

Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference. In a way, if someone says this didn't feel exactly right, I don't care. But that is not okay to do in academia - it's not about feeling. You want to establish a pretty solid case. So did this allow me to express things differently? Absolutely. Another thing I've been thinking about as an academic: our writing style is expository, and in fiction, withholding information matters quite a bit. Withholding things in academia - there's no place for that!