It would be very tempting to say that the book began for me, as it does indeed begin for the reader, when I imagined this pub with these people meeting for this very peculiar journey. And there may be some truth in that. I think that novels come from pretty mysterious areas within you. They are in a way dreamed up. I don't think of my own life and experience as a kind of reconaissance trip for my work.
Life is life, and one lives it.
So, because I happen to be in San Francisco, for example, I'm not thinking about useful research for some novel that I might partly set in San Francisco. I don't look at people I know and think of how I might turn them into characters in a novel. Not at all. I really do have tremendous faith in writing as a leap into the unknown. But it is a leap that you take with the sort of rope of the imagination to hang on to.