mold. So the breakthrough was to kind of twist that around and say, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t have any intentions. All my stories probably don’t hang together, so let me proceed beat by beat, sentence by sentence.” It means something to me internally. So what you do then is almost like biology, where you have this little sea crystal, and it grows outward, kind of organically. So a story will often work out that way. I take the smallest thing I can, and try not to create it with a bunch of conceptual or thematic ideas, and if they come up I try to kick them down. And then I let the story accrue sentence by sentence. With that method, if it’s working, you end up with something more than you expected. You didn’t really have a plan, and your subconscious, I would say, is manifesting through the prism of language, and it makes something that was unexpected. So then taking that same philosophy on a bigger structure – I could be starting a book, a story, I don’t know what it is. I’ll find out in seven years when I’m done. So that’s a little bit hard to talk about, but that’s the honest answer. The degree of intentionality in my writing is much less than I would’ve thought when I was a student. I thought you had to know it, have a worldview, be able to articulate it, and then you sat down and did it. But for me it’s totally flipped around the other way. The beauty of any kind of art, I guess, is that it’s a mysterious manifestation of you better than you usually are. That’s incredible. Well, I would recommend to anyone out there to read any of your short story collections. I feel like you’re a lot like John Cheever, that your stories are going to be their most powerful when looked at as one giant collection. But as long as we were here talking, I did want to talk about at least one of your stories [in detail]. And I thought we’d talk about one from the new book, which I thought, having read every single story you’ve ever published now, I think is the best one out of all of them. It’s called “Escape from Spiderhead.” I was wondering if you might give us a little rundown of the process that goes into writing a story like that. What you had in mind before you started, and whether you feel like you really nailed it. The reason I like it so much is that I feel like you do a really amazing job with that story of getting your point across without ever directly referring to the point that you’re trying to get across. Is it fair to say something like that about that story?
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I like that reaction, yes. For me, building off the last answer, the seed of that story was just this notion I’ve had since a little kid that in some ways, human beings can be thought of as machines. You have the flu, you’re an asshole. The flu goes away and you win the lottery, suddenly you feel differently. So I’ve always had this kind of interesting thought that if you could mechanically alter the brain to affect the most primary things that we associate with selfhood – love, lust, affection, loyalty – number one, if you could, would you? And if you did, would you be a good guy or a bad guy? Just those kinds of thoughts. So I remember, the day I started that, I just said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about this idea for a long time. I should do it.” And then a second vector that was playing in was that a lot of my stories, especially in the other books, are written in a kind of