I Don't Write Directly On To The

I'm Not Sure That All Books Aren't That Way. I Think That Might Apply To Any Book I Was Writing. The Book Was Kind Of The Product Of This Enormous Infatuation I Had, Not Only With The Office And Office Politics, But With Perspective, And Trying To Tell A Story From As Wide A Range Of Perspectives As You Possibly Can. I Tried To Capture It All With The First-person Plural, But Once I Settled On That, I Used It To Tell The Story From As Many Angles As I Could. I Guess, To Put It Romantically, It Was About A Love Affair With The Craft Of Perspective.

I Don't Actually Think Of The Internet As The Bad Guy. I Think Of The Internet As Doing A Hell Of A Lot Of Wonderful, Fascinating, Interesting Things. A Lot Of Information That's Exchanged On The Internet Is Extremely Useful, And Every Once In A While It Percolates Up To Knowledge. Wisdom Is Far Harder To Come By.

Names Generate Meaning In A Short Amount Of Space — They Provoke Thoughts, Questions. That's Something I Like Doing. Of Course, You Have To Be Careful. Sometimes It Can Alienate The Reader, It Can Be Another Level Of Mediation, To Make A Character Carry The Great Burden Of A Metaphoric Name. The Character Can Be A Device Before He Or She Becomes A Person, And That Can Be A Bad Thing For A Writer Who Wants To Offer Up A Kind Of Emotional Proximity In The Work. It's A Constant Struggle, The Desire To Be Playful And The Desire To Communicate On Some Very Stark Emotional Level.

I Wake Up Every Day In Order To Do Something That's Quixotic, And Not Necessarily Called For In The World, But I Do It Because There's Extraordinary Meaning For Me Behind The Effort.

I Think A Fairly Common Behavior Among Fiction Writers Is That They Want To Help. They're Generally Charitable People. They're Interested In The World. They're Curious, They're Empathetic. They Understand Suffering. They Don't Turn Away From That. But What They Do Is Essentially Useless. Except For The Sake Of The Thing Itself.