I think a certain amount of time and experience and pain have helped me — somewhat — with respect to the immature and selfish stuff. I think IJ is less self-indulgent and show-offy than anything I’d done before it, and that the stuff I’ve done since finishing IJ is even less ego-hobbled. Part of the improvement inside me, too, I think, is starting truly to “Respect” fiction and realize how very much bigger than I the art and enterprise are, to be able not just to countenance but live with how very very small a part of any Big Picture I am. Because I tend both to think I’m uniquely afflicted and to idealize people I admire, I tend to imagine you never having had to struggle with any of this narcissism or indulgence stuff, to imagine that the great gouts of Americana hurled daily at the page in the stoveless apartment of wherever you wrote it were as natively Disciplined and Respectful and humility-nourished as Libra or The Day Room. But now I rather hope that isn’t so. I hope that in the course of your decades writing you’ve done and been subject to stuff that’s helped make you a more Respectful writer. I would like to be a Respectful writer, I believe…though I know I’d far prefer finding out some way to become that w/o time and pain and the war of LOOK AT ME v. RESPECT A FUCKING KILLER.

Maybe what I want to hear is that this prenominate war is natural and necessary and a sign of Towering Intellect: maybe I want a pep-talk, because I have to tell you I don’t enjoy this war one bit. I think my fiction is better than it was, but writing is also less Fun than it was. I have a lot of dread and terror and inadequacy-shit, now, when I’m trying to write. I didn’t used to. Maybe the terror is part of the necessary reverence, and maybe it’s an inescapable part of the growing-up-as-a-writer-or-whatever process; but it can’t — cannot — be the goal and terminus of that process. In other words there must be some way to turn terror into Respect and dread into a kind of stolidly productive humility.