We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.

It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?

I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.

...water laughing softly down a black stone wall.

One area I have a huge amount of trouble in is writing about myself. I get a heavy, almost depressed feeling.

Structural dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, after having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.

A sense of that kind of narrative movement that we experience online could have been in my mind easily, though not consciously. I do rely so much on my unconscious, the way I write my stuff the way I do. I let my unconscious work. I have better ideas that way and more interesting work.