To the contrary: I wish I knew as little now as I did then. When you're just starting out, you're wonderfully unaware of the mistakes you're making.

I'm glad I didn't know much or I would never have been brave enough to try. I couldn't imagine starting now; it's so much harder to get published. I don't want to discourage anyone; if you feel like if this is what you love, do it. I think most people who want to write a book are utterly stymied that you have to put your butt in a chair and work by yourself. That's a hump they can't get over. You have to like your own company.

I used to believe in the myth of the big idea: The big idea hits and you never look back. It's sort of like when you meet a couple that's been together for a long time and the question you ask is "How did you guys meet?" And there's always a great story. But the real question — and the one that hopefully you're too polite to ask — isn't "How did you guys meet?" but "How did you stick together?" That's the story of writing a book. How did you stick with it? How did you get through the day-to-day? I think one of the reasons you get so many questions about process — "Do you plot?" "How do you do it?" "How do you do it every day?" — is because people want to believe there's a way to take the pain out of the process of writing. And there really isn't. You're going to have days that are terrible.

Do I have half a million words for this? I think the biggest thing I would say to my younger self were to have a time machine and go backward is: You have to have absolute humility about what you're doing. You have to somehow know that you are capable of enormous idiocies and mistakes and yet not lose your self-confidence in what you're doing. It's a difficult line to walk because I know that writer's block comes almost always from self-doubt. At the same time you have to know that this is a life-long learning process and you're going to find yourself every 10 years looking back on what you wrote 10 years ago and feeling appalled by it. And that's good; it means you're learning and growing.

After I'd gone through that awful war with the first book, I wish that I had had a little bit more faith in myself at times. It was a struggle. You have no basis to have any faith. You shouldn't have any faith in yourself but in the end you kind of have to, to get the work done. And it's a little bit of stubbornness and a little bit of ego and a little bit of hubris-ness and recklessness that you need to have, a combination of all those things.

You can hope for all the various prestigious publications and so on to come for you but in the end, the best thing you can do is work with people who are excited about you. Rather than deciding you're a failure unless you're published by X House, realize that the house that will make your career happen is the one that believes you are a fucking genius.

That first book was put out by a small press; I was the only book they were publishing that year, so I got a special kind of attention from the editors. And then the next book was with a big publisher and I love my editor there too, but you're in the machine. I remember for that book I had to go to a marketing meeting. I'd never heard of that kind of thing. And they said, "What are your goals for this book?" and I said "I want to be on Oprah," and they looked at me like I was crazy, like I was being serious. What I learned is just savor good publishing experiences because sometimes they're not so great.

I don't know if my publisher will be upset about this, but maybe I would have had more confidence in trying to control how my book was titled and packaged and publicized.

What I know now is that your worth as a person, as a writer, should not be defined by whether a corporation thinks they can make money off you or not.

I wish I'd known that there is no need to rush to have a book and that a good book is more important than the idea of a book as some kind of currency. I felt a lot of pressure to have a book as I put my first book together, some of it self-induced and some of it external. Fortunately I am happy with how that book turned out, but I also recognize that it is very much a first book.

One thing I might have said to myself — a lot of my student writers think this — I thought that if you write one book you're all set. That's not true. I didn't realize that books can vanish. I think that's why I worked hard to make the book strange or unusual. Better to wait on the first book, make sure it's special, because you never has much collateral as you do in that moment before that first books come out.

I wish I'd known how much you will be known for your first book. I say this with tremendous guilt, but I do half-wish I'd never published my first book, though in the end it's all worked out, and maybe for the best. Maybe I have that book to thank for everything that's come after it, and if so, I really do thank it! But I don't think my first book was very "me," whatever that means. I never quite understood what compelled me to write it. I've never written anything else like it since. I was so excited to get published that I didn't think about my relationship to what I was publishing; I thought,

Now I think differently.

I never would have thought that I'd look back at that first novel that was unpublished, like it was devastating at the time, and now I truly feel grateful that it didn't get published. If you'd told me five years ago that I'd feel this way, I just would have been shocked.

I'm glad I didn't know anything then. It would have been completely paralyzing. Now because I've worked as a citric, it's hard not to write a book without reading it as if you were reviewing it. One of the hardest things about writing any book is not having it unconsciously become like other books you have read. There's a creeping fear that in order for your book to succeed it needs to somehow be familiar with something you're already familiar with. Things that have influenced you end up having a direct impact on what you type. When I wrote

, I was inventing my book so it could really be anything. It could be the book I'd always wanted to read but never found.

Even this thing you're doing, this story, is kind of interesting, but I think in a lot of ways it will be detrimental to people trying to write books. I'm serious. What happens is: They will read this story and they will see these people giving their experience as if that experience is normative. As if the experience they're describing is how it works. And of course every experience like this is totally unique. Trying to fit your life into someone else's model is how bad books get created. Everyone wants advice about how to do something but it really only works if you're only going to plow forward regardless if you know nothing. But then again, that's how it was for me. So maybe I'm doing the exact same thing I'm complaining about.

That all human life and endeavor is futile but that art redeems us, if only briefly.