Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
Writing
Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it’s the home of the extraordinary, the only home.
What surprised me most while writing ‘The Monogram Murders’ was that everything I needed seemed to arrive in my head exactly when I needed it.
But maybe it’s up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it’s never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.
I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they’re both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that’s almost happening, never quite totally happening.
I keep a guitar around while writing and will improvise music. I do this for several reasons, such as that it’s fun, and sometimes it helps me with the meter.
I didn’t learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems – dreams, myth, history – from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.
Writing children’s books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.
There are all these things I want to do when I don’t have to finish a book. But I have to keep writing because I keep having children.
For me, a big part of writing psychological thrillers is choosing crimes committed for motives which would only apply to a particular person in a particular situation; a unique, one-off motive that is born out of someone’s particular range of psychological afflictions.