Andrew Sean Greer

I have to get three pages done every day, and there's usually a point about 150 pages in where everything falls apart, where all the plans are for naught. The book has become something else, and I have a nervous breakdown, and then I submit to what the book has become, and I keep going, and that's a terrible and then a great time.

You write three pages over six hours, and you don't feel like you've gotten anywhere, but if you've done a beautiful metaphor or a lovely sentence, or you finally got to some moment you wanted, then that's worth it. Then you can close your computer and get a little relief.

A lot of problems get solved in those sort of in-between moments when your subconscious has been working on some problem. If you keep it spinning, you can fix ideas sometimes better than if you focus on them directly.

It's hard to tell if I've had writer's block because it seems to me that it's when nothing comes, but, you know, every day you stare at that computer screen, and I think, 'It's never going to happen today. How can I write three pages?' And the hours pass, and they haven't shown up, and then at the very end it always happens, so it's willpower.

I think it would be bad to a truly successful celebrity person, because I know these novelists where people get a cult following, and they have some strange personal attachment to them because it's so personal to read a book.