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When I'm writing the text for a book like 'Little White Rabbit,' I read it aloud, alone, in my studio, again and again and again - because the rhythm has to be exactly right. After I get my manuscript to the point where I think it is perfect, I begin to think about what I want the art to look like.

On the last drafts, I focus on the words themselves, including the rub of vowels and consonants, stressed and unstressed syllables. Yet even at this stage I'm often surprised. A different ending or a new character shows up and I'm back to where I began, letting the story happen, just trying to stay out of the way.

When you're writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.

Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.

When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way.

Writing, for me, is a very fluid process. I sit down and wait for the words to come. They usually do - in buckets and waves. I look upon it as a blessing because the words come so easily.

I write as if I were drunk. It is a process of intuition rather than placing myself above my story like a puppeteer pulling strings. For me, it's a scary, chaotic process over which I have little control. Words demand other words, characters resist me.

I don't really have a metaphor for how I write, but it kinda feels like chipping away at a big dark object that I can't really see.

I write in a very strange way. Things are very fragmentary for a very long time, and then they come together very quickly near the end of the process.

There is one thing that matters, to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.