I try to write in the mornings, as soon as I'm up and caffeinated, and to stay in the chair as long as I can be productive.

As a writer, I've always been somebody who's been productive and hustled hard.

I came up in hip-hop, where people value the ability to tell it straight.

In college, my idea of a productive day was to start writing at 7 A.M. and not leave my chair until dinnertime.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

As long as I can remember, growing up we had a guitar around our house, and I was always plucking on it.