I have a graduate degree in counseling and evaluation (psychological testing) and I suspect that if I had not had any success as a writer, I would have returned to that field. I was pretty good at it, but I was not great. However, I had received raises and promotions as if I were great because my reports were better written than my colleagues’ reports. I seemed better on paper, but my real strength was with the written word.

I could have made a decent living as a counselor, but my heart was never in it. Perhaps, if I’d given writing a chance and failed, I would have become a better counselor. Counseling is demanding work, and it requires a delicate balancing act. One has to care about one’s clients without surrendering one’s life to them. At the place where I worked, there was one counselor who was so distant that he was really little more than a processor, and another who cared so deeply that she could not separate herself from the job, and some of her clients were living in her spare rooms. And then there was one brilliant counselor who navigated the job with style and good cheer, caring about his clients but finding the right place to draw the line with each. I saw him as a heroic figure. He also drove a Corvette, which I was never allowed to take for a spin, and he was dedicated to making his wife happy. If I hadn’t been able to make it as a writer and professor, I would have tried to be like him—except for the Corvette.

I make it a practice to be in the middle of the next project when a book is published, but my most recent novel came out at the same time that I had a play produced off-Broadway, and then I was commissioned to write a play based on a segment of the novel. The play already had a theatre ready to produce it and a very talented director attached to it, but I did not feel comfortable with the play, and after working on it for roughly a year, I withdrew from the project. My playwright friends told me that I was being foolish (they may have used harsher language), that one should never turn down a production. However, I decided that I didn’t like the play I was writing, and I made what felt to me like an ethical decision. It may have been a foolish decision, but I don’t regret it.

All of which is to say, I found myself afloat in the universe without a project. Eventually, I began a novel about two boys—good friends—and their parents. Over a few years’ time, I wrote about 800 pages about these boys. I’ve had some trouble whittling it down, but I think I resolved the issues, finally, this week. I sent a 300-page draft to a writer-friend, and I await his response. 

Every novel is challenging, but the circumstances surrounding this novel added to the difficulty.

Rebecca Makkai, Alice Munro, Bob Dylan (The Philosophy of Modern Song), and the work of my students. I just ordered a set of novellas by John O’Hara titled Sermons and Soda Water.

When I was in my thirties and teaching at Northwestern, I was given an NEA grant and took the year off to write. Toni and I spent the time in Tucson. In a used bookstore, I found a copy of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. I loved “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” but I had never read the novels. I think it cost $1.95. It was the most amazing reading experience of my life. We had a friend staying with us, and I would take her to therapy sessions, waiting in the lobby, reading. And one day, she walked off and came right back. “Is your therapist not here?” I asked. No, she had been gone for an hour, and it had passed for me as if in a matter of seconds. That’s how lost I was in the novel.

Put your faith in revision. Like many young writers, I was slow to understand that the most important writing I was ever going to do would take place while revising.