I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn't know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery.
I quickly realized I live the least interesting literary life imaginable. My parents are happily married. There haven't been any major traumas. I'm not sure that the story of my life would be much fun to read.
Despite my best efforts, word that an American tourist was in town quickly made its way around Grozny. That I had come to Chechnya not for business or NGO work, but to see the sites and meet the people, was notable enough to be broadcast throughout the republic.
I had assumed I'd pack my bags and head elsewhere after 'Constellation,' but Chechnya is creeping its way into the margins of my second book.
At Grozny TV, the line between journalism and government propaganda is traversed as often as a Manhattan crosswalk.
No one reaches the Oval Office without a great deal of admiration for the institution - and himself - so it's unsurprising that sitting presidents favor the biographies of former presidents.
The idea that fiction can capture the stories that fall through the cracks of history informed 'A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,' which progresses across the two Chechen Wars of the 1990s and early 2000s.
It's hard to think of another body of work that is more universally beloved - I don't think I've ever met someone who has encountered 'Calvin and Hobbes' without falling for them.
Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of. It can be one of the real joys of writing.
You look at a surgeon as you would a secular priest, almost, if it's your child, if it's your sister on the operating table. That was an idea that very much has interested me and I've wanted to explore for some time.
Bill Watterson argued with his medium even as he eclipsed it. He was all too aware that no artistic expression better exemplifies our disposable consumer culture than the daily newspaper comic strip: today's masterpiece is tomorrow's birdcage lining.
For the uninitiated, 'Calvin and Hobbes' is a daily comic strip detailing the antics of an unruly six-year-old and his misanthropic stuffed tiger. The boy, whose vocabulary is packed with more 10-dollar words than a GRE flashcard set, is named after John Calvin, the Reformation-era theologian who preached the doctrine of predestination.
For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.
I stopped by Politics & Prose to sign a few copies of 'Constellation.' A couple days later, I learned that Barack Obama also stopped by and left with one of them.
When confronted with the facts of foreign atrocities, the experience is often consigned to the realm of the unimaginable. Fiction makes the unimaginable imaginable.