[Text ID: "Q: What are your work habits for a novel?
A: Once I truly begin to write, I work obsessively, in twelve-hour days, punctuated by days of long sleep and vivid dreaming. Starting time and ending time are no longer important. I might begin at 9 A.M., or after noon or at eight in the evening. I go from there. I turn on the computer and write, write, write.
My room is a mess. Notes are scribbled on the walls so that I can look up at them at the appropriate moments and insert the date, the name, whatever, when I need it. Books are stacked so high that people have to search for me when they come into the room. Opened books with marked-up pages are stacked on top of one another.
I become suicidal. I go through a horrid despair some time or other before the final page, during which everything seems mean-ingless-from the dawn of history to the very hour in which I am writing. I'm intolerable to live with. But I spread myself thin over a number of loved ones and staff members so that no one person has to put up with how intense, hysterical, and miserable I am.
When I get elated and talk fast and furiously about wonderful aspects of history or the characters, or good developments in the story, people run away from me. I don't blame them.
While the novel is being written, I try to avoid dressing for out-doors. No one can make you go out if you don't have shoes on. Not even in the south. I wear long velvet robes and soft velvet slippers. I refuse to go out. All food is brought in. I eat hamburgers because they are easy to hold with one hand while reading and holding the book with the other hand.
In the middle of the night I read, sometimes on the carpeted floor of the bathroom, just because it's warm. I am wretched. I don't care anymore about being abnormal. Writing is everything. Everything. It seems impossible to write the book. It seems impossible to lift a hairbrush to brush my hair. But I do it. I put on mascara every day that I write.
This period of intense work lasts about six weeks. It's best that way. My imagination is overheated, and my memory clogged with data of varying importance. If I go over six weeks, I begin to forget things; I feel the loss of intensity and information and I become all the more self-destructive and obsessed.
The end of the book is a big event for me. A big event. I start screaming. I put the hour and the date at the end of the last page. I expect everybody to understand, at least a little. It's a triumph! The darkness of destiny has been driven back for a brief while. I celebrate. I scream, eat chocolate, and sleep.
Right near the end of writing The Vampire Armand, I realized I had to return to Italy, especially to Florence, and at once I began to make preparations for the trip. As soon as the novel was finished and off to the publisher's, as soon as it could be accomplished, I flew to Italy. That gave me hope, a way out of a life threatening darkness that often follows the climax of a book. But I still ate chocolate and screamed.
While writing, I don't want to rest. I don't want to sleep. Why sleep? It seems stupid, except when weariness overcomes me like a giant cloud of poisonous vapor. Then I sleep fifteen to twenty hours. I tell people to go in and out of the bedroom and ignore me lying there, as if I were dead. I won't talk on the phone. I won't open my eyes if I don't have to. I dream terrible, upsetting dreams. I want to kill myself. But I can't. I can't do it to other people, and I have work that must be done, novels that must be written. So I don't kill my-self. Besides, I don't think it's good to kill oneself. It's a horrible idea. It has a horrible effect even on acquaintances. I think a lot about people I loved who are dead. I think of how dead they are, year after year, ever more dead.
On the structure of the novel itself, I used to outline heavily. I don't now. I can't bear to know everything about what horrors await the characters. I don't want to know. I want-for this phase of my life-to write without knowledge of what is going to happen next. I want to be born again every day at the computer keyboard. I do envision an ending and a reason why the novel exists—a justification for the tale. But it's all vague. I want it that way.
I won't pre-write anymore. I refuse. I'll read and read and look and look in preparation. I'll see my character, his name, his general fate. But I won't pre-write. No notes for scenes. No bits and pieces of dialogue. No. It's too agonizing to move the characters toward a fate that has already been suffered by me in my mind. I'm fresher and better if I don't know for sure what is going to happen.
Heavily outlined and prewritten novels of mine include Cry to Heaven, parts of The Vampire Lestat, very little of The Witching Hour, all of Violin, Memnoch the Devil, The Tale of the Body Thief, and the last fourth of The Feast of All Saints.
The most spontaneous novels I've ever written were Taltos and The Vampire Armand. Almost all of Interview with the Vampire, and most of The Vampire Lestat, were utterly spontaneously written.
The first part of The Witching Hour, the first few chapters, were heavily prewritten. But then The Witching Hour became a runaway spontaneous novel with hundreds of pages taking shape before my eyes. I like it this way now.
I write on a state-of-the-art computer, with the fastest hard drive imaginable, and the greatest amount of memory. I use the old program Wordstar because I know it so well. I print out the work of the day when I finish every day no matter what the hour. I have a super-fast printer that can cough up a whole novel in no time. I always have a hard copy of all the work to date right beside the computer. If I move back to an earlier chapter, which I often do, I throw the old draft in a Ziploc plastic bag marked "old chapter no. whatever" and print out the new draft of the chapter and stick it with the others. I use lots of Ziploc plastic bags. I don't write by hand.
If a revelation comes to me when I'm too tired to really write, I scribble this on the wall of the bathroom or on the wall of my office, using a black Sharpie pen. With a black Sharpie, I write all over the computer, the keyboard edges, and the edges of the monitor.
I do keep a diary by hand. I've been keeping it since 1970." -end ID]
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