++ Patton Oswalt I've known Patton Oswalt for years, and have vague recollections of getting drunk with him three times in a week once. He is one of the nicest people I know, as well as one of the sharpest. I was amazed that he had time to answer three questions about writing. I kept the questions down to writing books -- he's written two great memoirs -- because otherwise I could have asked him a hundred questions about storytelling and generating material. I tend to think of you as multi-tasking, running a few different careers at once - were you aiming for a daily wordcount when you were writing the books, or were you breaking up the writing into sprints and chunks? I would have loved to have a “daily word count.” My dream is to have an unshakeable chunk of time every day — a little four-hour, silent oasis — where I’m at the keyboard, banging away with a jackhammer and then revising with a scalpel. Unfortunately, I kept getting offers to do things — TV shows I liked, fun stand-up gigs, interesting movies. And even more unfortunately, I’m a whore for fame and money and validation. So I had to learn to take the writing when it came, treat it like an occasional banquet rolled in front of a starving man. Now that I’ve re-read my stuff — especially Silver Screen Fiend? A lot of it reads that way. My situation crept into the syntax, I guess. When you were writing the memoirs, were you working to a plan or outline, or were you just striking out to see where you ended up? Beyond the initial idea, I mean. God knows I've written talks that are thousands of words long and I really had no idea where they were going. I had a better idea of where THIS one was going only because I had all of my meticulously kept, OCD calendars and schedules from the summer of 1995 until now. But they’re still in cryptic, skeletal form. What ended up being the challenge, narrative-wise, was going over the weeks and days and months and being honest about which ones could be jettisoned, which days and weeks and months were just wasted time and effort and didn’t need to be preserved as memory. That’s a hard truth to face about any life, but there are days we burn away. If we admit it, then the days when we are present and apply ourselves become more poignant and precious. I'm still kind of hoping for a novel from you sometime in the next few years. What kind of novel would be in your bucket list -- or do you get your impulse to storytelling out of your system in the other branches of your career? Well, I love crime novels. But I can’t decide which kind I’d like to write — a brutally honest, almost journalistic one like George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle, or a breezy, “sunshine noir” like Gregory MacDonald’s Fletch. Maybe I could kick open the market for a crime novel set during the early months of 1995 — when the internet is first emerging. The slow, tidal shift into the “online culture” of the 21st century would be part of the plot? But I don’t know yet. Like the memoirs, it’ll take me over and I’ll be at the service to the muse when I start writing. I can still trust in that. Patton's most recent book is the fine SILVER SCREEN FIEND (UK) (US)