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There is only one person who reads my stuff before I hand it in, and that is Tracy Kidder. He’s like
my boss, and he’s a very close friend. He’ll come over and rip pages away from me, or sit at my
computer and read stuff. He’s the only person I allow to do that. He’ll cover the front and back of
each page with notes. He tells me his opinion, and he can be very opinionated. He’s usually right
about what’s not working. Sometimes his solutions are not the ones I like, though. Or he may be right,
but I just don’t see it. And if I don’t see it, he’s got to beat me up for a while before I make the change.
Do you have any other editors you trust?
Yes, a great editor at Random House named Bob Loomis. I trust his judgment without question or
hesitation. His editing style is very different from Tracy’s. Whereas Tracy will tell me exactly what
he thinks I need to do to fix something, Bob is more elliptical. He’ll put these little dots under a
passage and a question mark next to it. He doesn’t usually tell me precisely what is wrong, and that
forces me to go back over it again and figure out what’s gone wrong.
Do you mind talking about your work-in-progress?
I’m not big on it, but it’s not because I’m secretive, or that I feel talking about it will suck the
energy out of it. It’s just tiresome. Also I’ve had some disheartening experiences when talking about
my work in the past. When I was writing A Civil Action, I developed an abbreviated explanation to
give when people asked what I was doing. I could see them losing interest within the first fifteen
seconds. That depressed me. I’ve got a two-minute pitch about the book I’m writing now, which I
give at dinner parties, just so I’m not perceived as rude. This book tells very well, which also
worries me. If I can tell the story with such fluidity, I don’t understand why the hell it’s taking me so
long to write it.
Do you need to be anyplace in particular to write?
I like to have all my stuff with me: notes, books, computer. Even if I’m not going to use them, I need
to be surrounded by everything that is relevant to the project. For the last few years, I’ve been
splitting my time between Northampton, Massachusetts, and Rome, Italy. So I bought double copies of
every book, and made second hard copies of all my notes. But I don’t like making copies of my notes
because the sets don’t have the same marginalia and comments on them.
More important than the ambience of my workplace is how much time I have before and after I
write. I can’t just come back from vacation, turn on the computer, and begin writing where I left off. I
need a sort of buffer on either side of my writing. It is a psychological transition, a decompression
period to get used to things before I write. And then, once I start writing, I need a seemingly limitless
amount of uninterrupted time in front of me.
I get upset if I have to go out to a dinner or to a party during a week I’m supposed to be working,
because then my time won’t be completely free. I need to be able to think about my project at any
moment that week. Weeks with social engagements or dentist appointments are fucked-up weeks for
me. They feel too broken up for me to use properly. I don’t mean to make it sound too monastic, but it