He was brilliant, and bold, and opinionated, and he swore a lot, and laughed a big sinister laugh…
You’re at a party, social event etc. Someone you’ve never met approaches you and introduces himself or herself. They have no idea who you are so they ask, “What do you do for a living?” What do you say? I just say I write books. It’s not a very interesting answer. It’s always tempting to fib, and say I’m a stuntman, but I never have the sack to lie. Can you give me the process of writing a novel from start to finish? I know it’s not as easy as having an idea, sitting down and writing 50K words over the course of a month and then having it edited and published. What’s the whole process and timeline if you don’t mind? Maybe we can use one of your past works as an example? In the past, every time I’ve written a book it’s been radically different. What Is the
What and Zeitoun were very protracted processes involving a lot of interviews, travel, research, fact-checking, on and on. The Circle, because it was the most recent, was a relatively quicker process. I’d been taking notes for years, thinking I might someday write something involving technology and privacy and democracy, but it wasn’t really coming together until 2012, when I wrote a scene involving a woman being scolded for spending a weekend without documenting it on social media. It was just a satirical scene, but it made me laugh, and out of that the novel grew. Usually a book starts with a passage, a scene, that clicks. Once something clicks, the rest comes in a rush. Once I had the tone and the protagonist for The Circle, that book was written in a shorter span of time than anything else I’ve done. 113 Still, there are multiple steps: revising repeatedly, then show-