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I wrote a lot of stuff quickly: pages and pages of notes that seemed pretty incoherent at first. Most of it was taken from the radio because -suddenly being a parent- I'd be confronted by the radio giving a news report every hour of the day.

When I write, I tend to read it out loud to myself after. I'm a very uncomfortable reader, so it creates a distance between the text and me - it is a new way to see it.

Honestly, most of the stuff I made for 'TV on the Radio,' I write in the studio.

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

And I tend to listen to NPR when I'm not writing.

Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.

At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice.

I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot.

When my writing really started to take off was when I made a decision that I would write only what I wanted to write, and if 10 people wanted to hear it, that's fine.

I rarely listen to music while writing. I wish I could, but it distracts me.