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.
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.
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.
