I have a plat on the wall of the county in northeastern Colorado that is the prototype for the invented Holt County that I write about and where all of my invented people live and die and commit their acts of sudden kindness and unexpected cruelty. I have brown wrapping paper taped up on the wall, on which I make notes about whatever novel I'm working on, and I have several pictures on the wall drawn by my youngest daughter, who's an artist, and also four photographs of western landscape paintings by Keith Jacobshagen and Ben Darling, and — not least — I have on the wall a black-and-white photograph of a High Plains barbed wire fence choked with tumbleweeds.

On my desk I keep a sapling chewed by a beaver. I also keep on my desk a bird's nest, a piece of black turf from Northern Ireland, a plastic bag of red sand from the stage at the new Globe Theater (taken after the production of Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale"), a piece of brick and some paddock dirt from Faulkner's home at Rowan Oaks, an old-fashioned hand warmer in a velvet sack, a blue bandana, a jackknife that once belonged to my maternal grandfather, Roy Shaver, who was a sheep rancher in South Dakota, and an obsidian arrowhead my father found in the North Dakota Badlands, where he was born almost 100 years ago.

I do not pay much attention to these things, but having them there makes a difference. I suppose it is in some way totemic. The things on my desk and on the walls above it connect me emotionally to memories, ways of living, people and geographical areas that are important to me. It's an emotional attachment to all these things that connects me up with the impulse to write. I don't feel sentimental about these things in any sloppy way, but I do feel a strong emotion remembering things, remembering people, remembering places and sights. Every time I go down to work, I feel as if I'm descending into a sacred place.

As for the work, once I get to my office, it's done in a ritualistic, habitual way. First of all, I admit that I have a special attachment to the old pulpy yellow paper that was once used by newspaper reporters. You can't buy it anymore. Or at least I can't. But I was very lucky about seven years ago when the secretary at the university where I'd been teaching discovered six reams of it while cleaning out old cabinets, and she gave them to me. It was a great gift to me, like manna, like a propitious omen.

I'm very frugal with this old yellow paper: I type on both sides. I believe I have enough to last me the rest of my writing career. I use it only for first drafts of the scenes in novels. And then I use a manual typewriter, a Royal, with a wide carriage, and write the first draft of a scene on this yellow paper and, as I say, I write the first draft blindly.