Once I had the voice, I knew I wasn't going to fall off the bicycle. I tap right back into it. It really was like learning how to ride a bike - you never forget, and I was able to carry it along with some ease. I never encountered any stumping problems that left me not knowing what to do, so I was mostly able to hold my ground. Of course, I should mention that it took me a long time to actually acquire the voice; there were a lot of frustrated attempts along the way, revisions to long sections and versions of the book that I abandoned.

To conform is to lose your soul

All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making.

I think one of the ways you avoid being angry is to avoid being angry at the people in power. They might do crappy things, and piss you off, and make bad decisions, but they shouldn't be hated simply because they're in power. And I thought it was important to humanize them if the book was going to be even-handed to all the different ways you encounter people at work.

The whole time I was writing, I had to fight my normal inclination to be funny, to sort of patch humor in, in order to convey all of the disruptions of the disease to the family dynamic, the loss of individuality, the impact on professional life, and the sanity of the main character. Of course, that's not to say it never sneaks in; there's some black comedy in there, like when he shows up to court wearing a bicycle helmet and won't take it off.

I think comedy is so much easier to do on the page than it is in real life. When I'm writing, comedy is an easy way to win over the reader. You're automatically more disposed to keep reading, thinking maybe, "I'll get another laugh or two." I think it's a survival instinct in me. I mean, you don't want to lose these guys within five or ten pages. You want them to keep going. I think to some extent it's a desperate measure that I throw out there, because a novel isn't a complete waste of time if it made you laugh.

I'm being provided with some emotional ballast by giving me an intimate portrait of one character in particular in contrast to the collective. I'm fortunate that I had very sympathetic readers, but ordinarily - if a book makes you laugh too much, it shifts from "literature" to "entertainment."