Why my next book is (partially) upside down
"It was exciting, since I’d never written a nonfiction book, but also upsetting, since I’d never written a nonfiction book."
The thing that that happens between starting a novel or story and finishing it is a familiar mess—
I try to write the text in order, but I often write everything out of order, sometimes even in various documents hiding in all over my laptop. I try to revise as I go, but also do huge backwards revisions. I try to be efficient and patient, but I often get aggressive with deleting things. I sometimes make outlines, but only after the fact, only as a way to try to condense what’s happening in a messy three-hundred page document into a single page. Structure is always secondary to the needs and tics of the characters. Plot is something that happens when I’m busy thinking about something else.
But what happened during the two-ish years I was writing The Möbius Book (which you can pre-order now, btw) was totally different and the result was a book that is going to be printed half upside down.
The first six months I was working on it, I was, I thought, in no mental shape to write anything new. For part of that time I had to respond to the final copy edits on Biography of X, but other than that I was too bewildered to work. Because of circumstances beyond my control, I was living with friends for a while—one friend per month, moving from city to city, living out of a suitcase.