Anyway, daybreak. I go down to get something to eat and get my little lunch bucket--it looked like a little miner's lunch bucket--and went back to my room and slept. I was supposed to be drinking with Alan Cheuse that night--that guy who's on PBS, he has that "All Things Considered" kind of thing--and we were gonna go drinking. And I got out on the back porch where I was supposed to meet him and there was the president of Yaddo, and she looked up and I said, "Oh, God. It's Ray, he's in the hospital again." And she said, "No. He died." He died that night. And I swear, I left--I was supposed to be at Yaddo another two weeks--I left a couple days later, and I've never been back. That was in '88, I've never been back to Yaddo. That was August of '88, and I put the book away for years.

Actually, it was Scott [Turow]--of all the human beings on the face of the earth, he's one of the few who's read the three feet of fiction. And he kept saying, "Get back to it, man, get back to it. Get down to the fiction, get back to the story and get off that metaphysical, metaphoric, metafiction, all that crap--bag all that." And I just went back to it and did it. I cut it down to a measly 900 pages. Scott in essence served as my agent. He pretty much said to Farrar, Straus & Giroux--they're his publishers--he pretty much could say, "Do me a favor," and they'd do it. Essentially, that's what happened. He got me introduced to Farrar Straus, and I was lucky enough for it to land on a young editor's desk who thought it was funny. Hopefully more than just funny. But that's essentially how that happened.

Thomson: You mentioned that one of the editors who saw it thought it was funny, which is one thing you hear a lot when people comment on this book. Another thing that reviewers have said is that the characters aren't necessarily sympathetic, but they have the readers rooting for them anyway. How did you do that--create characters that aren't necessarily "nice" or "good," but still have the readers invested in them?

Kinder: Boy, if I knew that, I'd distill it, put it in a bottle, and I'd sell it. Hock it to creative writing programs. I have no idea. I didn't set out with a sense of "OK, now let me create characters who aren't necessarily sympathetic, but you can empathize with." I haven't a clue. I think, if nothing else, they just begin to loom. I've said this before--I wish I did have more imagination, to make things up out of whole cloth, just invent them, because I do like science fiction, I like genre mystery and stuff, but I do write pretty close to the bone. Yet I think of this book as a work of imagination in the sense that my imagination--and I think every writer, to one degree or another, starts from their own experience to a degree, some are more successfully "imaginative" than others--I found myself collapsing characters, combining events, moving the narrative line, kind of like a shell game. But yet again, I had really good material to begin with, and the characters, I lived with them both really and imaginatively for so long. I just sort of knew them so well, and I think within any "character/real human being" there are enough empathetic points, and if you render them well enough, we can even find our own humanity in outlaw characters. I guess because they were so real to me that I could render them in a way that people could empathize with them.

Thomson: Most writers will say that there isn't one right process of writing or one right set of rules, but people are always curious to know individual authors' methods and idiosyncrasies. Do you have certain habits you follow in your writing?

Kinder: Nothing of interest. What can I say? I used to write longhand on legal tablets, and finally I got to a word processor, and still what I do is sort of like longhand and transferred to the word processor. I got used to using that, but slowly and surely Diane pulled me into the electronic age. I have a computer that I can use like a typewriter, so I do.

              I play tricks on myself. I'll change my schedule--there'll be a period of time where I'll literally write all night, go to work at 10:30 and work until dawn, end up out on my front porch smoking and drinking coffee, watching the morning come alive. And then it goes stale for me, and I'll switch it around. There's no rhyme or reason to it.

           In terms of process--none. When I'm really working, I try to have a solid five-hour day, though I often work more than that. I'll get my morning time in then sit down and watch TV or listen to music. I usually find myself getting back to work after dinner. That's when I'm really cookin'. I've always found if I tell myself, "You must do something good." I won't do it. I have a tendency to be lazy. I have horrible taste in things, like I watch "Judge Judy" and "Seinfeld" reruns every night at 7:30. So I have absolutely no suggestions at all, none whatsoever, --cause my habits are so erratic. Except I do it. I do do it, you know?

Kinder: I'll say. Especially because I get so much energy from my so-called "students." I get more energy from them than they get from me. I'll come out of workshop, especially a really good one, just high as a kite. I'll come home and think about everything we talked about, and I'll invariably get ideas, and I get those down and get to work. I don't know why, but I seem to get more work done, fresh work, when I'm teaching then when I'm on sabbatical.