More of MZD. This is the first of several questions he answered during his stop at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA. It’s an extremely long, meadering answer, but I like his joke about Hollywood.

MZD Q&A 1

Transcription below the cut. Text is broke up arbitrarily for easier reading.

[[I'm just curious about, uh, your writing process. Uh, I know that, uh, it's been seven or eight years, uh, between books and I think, uh, [unintelligible] you spent something close to ten years writing that. Well, I was wondering about, uh, I guess the process that you go through and how, uh, you know, you spoke about having difficulty or feeling maybe strange about [unintelligible] House of Leaves. Did you take excerpts from it while you were [unintelligible]. So I was wondering how…how you maintain that, not maybe interest, but, uh, how, how such a long writing process affects you and how the book and the concepts change over a period of time as you’re writing.]

So the question is, how.. how do I main-maintain…focus?

[[Um, yeah, I mean-]]

How, how, how do I maintain focus, and how is my work affected, when, uh, House of Leaves took ten years, and Only Revolutions took six years. Um…that’s a very good question. Uh, I, you know, I… part of it is entirely personal, and, and in some ways untraceable. It’s, it’s something that gets inside me and I want to fulfill, uh, that story. Um. And so, you know, Only Revolutions was, was something that seemed at first so simple, you know, just inspired by these, you know, two strays that I came across.

It was uh, it was uh, inspired by the the road movies that I loved to watch. You know…On a basic level it just, you know, there wasn’t abook about, you know, a couple on the road, really. The movies were replete with them, but you know, there was, there was Huck and Jim and there was Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, it was father and son, Paper Chase, it’s uh.. ah, I mean, Paper Moon it was father and daughter and you know, uh, On the Road is really sort of, you know, Jack Keroauc’s alter egos.

So it was really basic on that level and I knew that I wanted to write something that was outside. House of Leaves was all about the interior and getting within, and, and, and this was going to be a book about openness, about, about that which was even beyond myself. You know, which is I think why, why love is the central theme because it’s, it’s casting your lot with someone that is completely other than yourself, um, as opposed to Johnny Truant’s, you know, investigation and exploration of self and Will Navidson etc.

And also early on, I had, I had this idea about how the book could, could physically, uh, depict that relationship so that, you know, he would start on one side, she would start on the other, they would be as far apart as possible in the way they saw the world and the amount of the, and the amount of the page they took up, in the, in the way they saw themselves, in the way they reflected the history of the other…

And then slowly as you got through the book, and you headed towards the middle, things would start to fall into line. Their, their sense of the world would become more accurate, their reflection of, of, um, of each other’s words and sentiments would be more accurate and then there would be this feeling as you move past that center point, that you would feel them, you know, move away from one another. And, and, and, you feel the rela- relationship tear away from itself.

So that was all very early. You know, you know, and, and it seemed kind of simple. But to actually follow through on that idea was far more daunting that I imagined. You know, I thought it was a little foothill that I was gonna climb. You know, and maybe there was some fog behind it. You know, so I kind of climbed up and maybe I heard some giggles in the background, kind of evil giggles-

[Crowd laughter]

-leading me on, and they [unintelligible] interesting–

So I get to the top of that foothill and then I see, like, well, wait a minute, there’s some, still keeps going higher and the fog kept receding and the giggles started getting louder. So I climbed higher and higher. And I looked back and I realized the fog had kind of moved in behind me. I said, well, I might as well climb to the top because, you know, I live in Hollywood, California, and there’s no big mountains.

[Crowd laughter.]

And then I just kept climbing and climbing higher. And the, and then the giggles started sounding a little more like growls, and, and, and, uh, and then I realized I was really in for it, and, uh, and they were pretty rough.

But, you know, I, I am being serious in the sense that that idea really begins to, you know, hold on, onto, it held onto me, and then the characters themselves became more and more significant. And I realized that it wasn’t just the biography. Like, what is the nature of identity? What’s the nature of personality? More important, what is the nature of freedom when opposed to love, you know?

Love is this kind of, you know, in the, in the idioms of our day, it’s, you know, people referr to the ball and chain or you know, that you’re entrapped, and yet at the same time, falling in love with someone is just this expression of, of, of freedom. It empowers you. It gives you a courage to move on, you know. And, uh, and of course as I began exploring that, it became, you know, a much larger [unintelligible] — I was reading authors that, you know, dealt with landscape and dealt with the philosophy of the open. And, you know, looking at artists that, that deal spec-specifically with, an, you know, with, with nature and, and these things kept pushing and pushing until finally I realized that the, the very nature of their identity had kind of, had, had become deracinated from any kind of temporal location.

And, and I realized that, you know, these, these sixteen-year-olds were, were present throughout the decades. And, and I began to study their language and their vernacular and I began to talk to people out on the road and I’d go to different places and I travelled the Mississippi and I talked to people, you know, who, what was it like when you were sixteen? And who did you fall in love with? And, you know, what’s your favorite personal moment and your personal historical moment? What was your relationship to that? And then eventually I went online and, you know, something, just giving a broad spectrum of, of how much goes into a book. And so for me, it’s kind of, it’s kind of an accomplishment that I did it in six years!

[Crowd laughter.]

But that’s kind of an overview.