The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, 'The Magic Monkey' - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.
The only strategy I know of is to write every day, which I don't always do, because sometimes I just can't, for various reasons that seem out of my control.
Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way; you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth.
It takes an entire book to tell you what it was like. To see Robert De Niro play your father - it's not a simple answer. To see Julianne Moore play your mother. To see Paul Dano play you - that's an even more inscrutable question... he's amazing, he's totally amazing, but I can't really say if he's a good me or not.
Our job as writers, as far as I can tell, is to attempt to express what seems inexpressible.
For the first few months, I was a comically inept parent. The first night home from the hospital, I held her bare body against my bare chest until a friend who was a doctor came by and asked what I was doing, and told me to put some clothes on that baby.
