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anymore. I trust my editors more than I used to— trust myself more, I suppose.
How many drafts do you typically go through?
I’ll do fifteen to twenty drafts of the first few sections. Backing up, running forward. I do fewer as I
get closer to the end.
Is there any particular place you like to be when writing?
I prefer to face a wall. I daydream less than when I’m looking out a window. I used to go to
writers’ colonies. Or off to cheap, quiet spots where the surf was good. Indonesia, Sri Lanka. My
wife and I have a young daughter now, so I stay closer to home.
What kind of authorial presence do you strive for?
It varies with each piece. Leaving aside a few straightforwardly autobiographical things I’ve done,
I find that establishing a connection between the narrator, the “I” character, and the subject of a story
can often be useful. It can help the reader get into the story, even if it’s just a matter of placing them in
a car with you as you travel through some landscape. But you have to judge closely if and when the
“I” character is actually going to help a story.
It was actually kind of a turning point for me, as a younger writer, to realize that the first person
could be a very useful character. It’s a character who can change—within limits, of course—from
piece to piece. It can have different uses, play different roles. Yes, everything that the “I” character
says in one of my stories is something I actually said, but that’s less confining than it sounds, simply
because, by selecting what to quote, I can, in virtually every case, make myself out to be a jerk or a
genius or anything in between.
In other types of pieces—particularly pieces where my narrative authority seems questionable, for
whatever reason—I try to reveal my biases, my own fallibility. In those cases, I imagine myself
standing in for my readers, who are broadly likely, for reasons of shared culture and class, to see
things more or less the way I do. Writing about the illegal drug trade in New Haven, for instance, I
had my little theories about why kids went into it, and what it all meant, and I laid those out—the
terrible collision of grinding poverty with the ideology of consumer individualism, and so on. But
then, having offered my analysis, I felt obliged immediately to hand over the microphone, as it were,
to someone who was actually living in the thick of it all. So I quoted an antidrug activist, a
grandmother who lived in the projects, who completely disagreed with my liberal moral relativism.
“Wrong!” she said. “I’m sorry, but these kids know right from wrong . . .” And she went on to give a
straight-ahead Christian moralist’s analysis of the drug trade. I actually gave her ideas more space
than my own because her authority on the subject—based on personal experience, based on
neighborhood history—was in so many ways greater than mine.
What kind of a tone do you strive for?
Some stories seem to impose a certain austerity of tone. On those, the less the writer gets in the