Let’s talk about your environment. Is there an ideal time or place when you get your best writing done, either your prose or songs?

The short answer is that I keep an office external to the house, and I go in there in the morning. But that’s only for my prose writing. I can do music anytime and anywhere, which is partly out of necessity. I can write in the van or at the venue. When I'm at the house, there’s no particular room I favor, but when I write music, the center of power floats. When I was writing All Eternals Deck, I wrote the demos at our dining room table because it just seemed to be coming out good there. It’s almost mystical. I don’t believe that there’s a power hanging over it, but at the same time there’s a power accumulating. It’s the same thing when I work with a particular guitar, because I have a bunch. Sometimes, one guitar is just giving up the goods, so you keep writing with that one even though it’s not the best guitar you have. Once I get a new guitar, once I get comfortable with it, it tends to spit out a few good songs pretty quickly.

Back to prose, I write in my office in the morning. I’ve always wanted an office. I go there, and it sounds simple, but it’s a habit: I sit down and I write. For the first year, I didn’t have internet access in the office, so all I could do was write. But I eventually needed it to do research for my books, for example to find out what movies were playing in 1972. So I’ll write in the morning then go out for lunch, after which I stop by the house. That’s when the Mountain Goats stuff pulls me aside. But I think that’s good because it allows me to use my office just for prose since it gains power as a place the more I use it. That’s where I wrote Universal Harvester, so now it feels like something big happened there.

I imagine it’s also a feeling of confidence to work in a space where something big has happened. That comfort is reassuring.

It’s interesting because I know there are some producers—and I hope never to work with one—who try to make their clients uncomfortable. Of course, if the client knew, they’d get fired. But they have this idea that their clients will work better when they are frustrated. Don’t let the clients get too comfortable or else they won't do their best. I've done takes in the studio where I say to myself I'm going to do this well because I want to get out of here. Laughs.

Are there any rituals to your writing process?

Not really. I’ve always wanted to demystify the process. While there is magic in it, the bottom line is that it’s work. It’s labor. That’s what makes it noble. Getting to the office has really helped me see it as work. If you are going to a place to do work, your mind is your best friend and says Let’s work. My mind flips pretty quickly when I get there. When I went to the office this morning, I had a bunch of stuff on my plate that I spent about an hour and half doing, then I turned to my writing and my mind immediately said You're here. This is the place.

What about writer’s block?

It doesn’t exist. I consider creative work labor, not magic, but so is the ability to build a house. If bricklayers get bricklayer’s block, they get fired. It’s not like there’s no creativity in that work either. All work is creative, and labor is noble. Writing is labor. Painting is labor. You have tools when you write, tools like language. You're not always writing at the peak of your game, but the idea that nothing is coming doesn’t make sense. It’s something you do.

How about writing instruments: do you have a preferred one?

I write songs with pen and paper, almost always. I’m a big fan of notebooks and pens. I do not like to write in blue ball point, but I will. I like black ball points and pencils. Pencils are pretty great, actually. And I do get temporary attachments to certain notebooks and pencils. If I'm writing songs in a certain notebook, it will start to feel like This is the notebook where the action is. And I can document this, because I’ll go back to the notebook and realize Holy fuck, these are the four best songs on the album, in the same notebook on four consecutive pages. Or I'll have three great songs, then one total dog, then one great song. I was looking at the Tallahassee notebook recently, and it was insane how so many of the better songs on that record were written either in the same day or within days of each other in the same notebook.

But prose I have to write on my laptop. I keep physical notebooks with outline notes and ideas, but because it’s so big, I have to use a laptop. I even keep notes on my phone in a program called Bear. It’s incredibly useful because it’s so sortable. And they’re not paying me to tell you this.

How much revision do you do to your lyrics?

Some of this is because I've been at it so long, but on the new album there are some songs where it’s pretty much the first draft. I may have crossed out an entire verse here and there and changed a lyric or two, but not too much. I don’t revise all that much lyrically. But with prose? I revise maniacally. I love it! It’s the best part.

That’s great. What do you like about the revision process so much?

You're vying with the gods! Anyone can write sentences. But knocking them into shape so that they are good, especially when you have a bunch next to each other? That’s incredible. Willa Cather is probably the best prose stylist of the 20th century. It’s effortless to read. So clean, and there is no confusion. When do you ever have to go back to a Willa Cather sentence and ask yourself what happened? Never. Of course, when you stop to look at it, you know that her sentences must have been carefully revised. She must’ve put a great deal of effort in there to make it look effortless.

With poetry, of course, it’s the same way. Thomas Hardy was a brutal reviser. But when the poems come out, they look like they were already there, just waiting for someone to scoop them up. William Gass, one of my favorite writers, was the opposite. I think he revised with an end to you noticing the immense architecture of his sentences.

The initial creative spark is a burst: even if it’s slow, it’s still a flow. But what comes after is sculpting. You make something last by fixing everything that’s wrong. That’s what I did this morning, and it was so satisfying.

I’ve always believed that the best revision process involves getting as far away from your writing process as possible. The closer you are to the writing process, the more likely you are to miss things. So I always print out my drafts and read them aloud.

I read everything out loud. When I'm writing, I'll often stop to read out loud. And I like to print too, because I hate to read from the screen. I usually pace with the manuscript in hand from room to room. Or if it’s a single room, I just pace around the room, reading out loud with a pencil in my hand, noticing what flows or doesn’t flow.

How much distance do you need, either physical or emotional, to write about something?

I do want temporal distance if I'm writing about myself. On the other hand, I can set something someplace in fiction and be in that place as I'm writing about it. The one thing is that you don’t want your theme to be I'm in this place. That’s not a good theme. I'm here is a very narcissistic theme. You want your theme to be beyond you.

When William Wordsworth said Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility, that’s a really good line. In other words, you have strong emotions, but f you're observing something you can't measure it, and if you're measuring something you can't observe it. That’s a solid rule in writing too. It’s something I think about because people are so into live blogging and live tweeting. I am so not interested in what someone’s first reaction was. What’s interesting is how you feel after you spend time with something after letting it mellow inside of you. But we live in a time of great privileging of the first reaction. Some of that is valuable in writing, because your first look might be your best look. But I do think that if the first idea is the best idea, then the first version is not the best version.

Last question: who are you reading?