When you're spending that much time by yourself in your car looking at landscapes, it's desolate. Most of the other people around you are invisible in their own cars. You're driving past houses where maybe once in a while somebody is out, but that's about it. So I was interested in that aesthetic and I decided I wanted to write an apocalyptic narrative, but the more I thought of it, it seemed bizarre and untenable to me to pick one, so I just didn't.

A lot of times when I ask people what their apocalyptic fantasy life is like, they'll immediately say something like, "Oh, what I think is going to kill us is climate change or World War IV," and that's not what I'm interested in at all. The point is not about winning a bet about what's going to happen. The point is about the human action of examining the possibility, the kind of obsessive imagining about it.

One of the reasons I like to hang out with scholarly types is they can do a broad reach conceptualization of things that is astonishing to me. I'm really good at the particulars but I have to do an immense amount of critical thinking to make something larger of it.

Here is the alphabet of the pulsing apocalypse that is fatherhood, a book in love with what words, like parents, create: beauty, terror, awe.

The story, I like to say and remember, is always smarter than you—there will be patterns of theme, image, and idea that are much savvier and more complex than what you could come up with on your own. Find them with your marking pens as they emerge in your drafts. Become a student of your work in progress. Look for what your material is telling you about your material. Every aspect of a story has its own story.

Ideologically, I have a lot of problems with that, especially when people toss around that form of story as realism. What's called "realism" is actually highly formulaic.

Writing a book is about me doing the work to get from the obsessive particular to something that reaches out of that in some meaningful way. It doesn't come easy to me. I really admire people who do it with acuity, but I don't, and for me it takes the process of working on a book for years to do any thinking that I feel accomplishes anything. I don't do it off the cuff well.