 There are certain questions that I'm asked a lot. People will say, which of the movies that were made out of your books do you like? They'll ask me, or probably the most common one is, where do you get your ideas? And it's, to me, if you ask me that specifically, I can tell you about 50% of the time where I got the ideas. And the rest of it is totally, it's like getting an idea in a dream. And I can't really remember where they came from. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. But to talk a little bit about the process, the way that it works for me, and it might not work that way for you, but this is the way it works for me. I want to talk a little bit about what I'm working on now, which is a novel that's about three quarters done. And if I'm very, very lucky, it will get finished. But no, man. By Tuesday. Because, no, actually, I'd love to get it done by the end of the year. And I'm really driving on this thing now. Once I start to really drive, it usually goes fairly fast. But I never know if a book's going to get done until it's done. Because I don't plot. I don't keep much in the way of notes, probably more than I used to, because I'm older. And that's what happens. Your gears start to slip a little bit. But one of the worst things that I ever heard, for me, personally, was I did something with John Irving one time. And he said that when he's starting a book, the first thing he does is write the last line. And I thought to myself, Jesus Christ, that's like eating the frosting off your cake and then eating your cake. To me, I didn't see it. But he knows everything is going to happen. And I know, really, fuck all what's going to happen. I'm telling you the truth there. But here's the way this works for me. When I was driving up from Florida to Maine last year, because I always drive back and forth, I stopped the first night in South Carolina. And I stayed at a motel, Motel 6 or something like that. And there's really not anything to do there, but turn on the TV and kick back and watch the local news and whatever else happens to be on. So I turned on the TV and there was the local news. And they had this story. And the story was about something that had happened at a McDonald's. The McDonald's, this was like a year ago. The economy still really just absolutely wretched. And so McDonald's announced that they were hiring in this town. It might have been Charleston, I'm not sure. But all these people turned up, there were like 1,000 people that turned up to apply for jobs. And there was one woman in this bunch of people that was waiting to try to get a job who had had a fight with another woman the day before. The first woman was married to this guy. She caught the woman who was applying for a job in McDonald's in bed with her husband. She got wicked pissed. And she decided that she was going to confront this woman, you know, and basically rip her hair off if that was possible. So she got in her car. She found out that the woman was applying for a job at McDonald's. And she drove there. And she got out of the car, pushed away through all these job applicants, and grabbed this woman and started to shake her. They had a fight. The woman who was applying for a job broke away and disappeared into the crowd. So the woman who had come there, got back into her car, put it in gear, and drove into the job seekers. They just went everywhere. There was cell phone footage of it. She got the woman, pasted her a couple of good ones, got back into her car, threw it in reverse, and backed over a bunch more people on her way out when two people were killed. And I thought to myself, I want to write about this. I didn't know why I wanted to write about it or what I wanted to write about it. I just knew that I wanted to write about it. Now, some people, when I'm in a group like this, and I'm not going to stand behind this goddamn elector in the whole time, because it feels weird, like a presidential debate or something. But people say, do you keep a notebook? And the answer is, I think a writer's notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around. It's like, to me, it's like, if you were to put breadcrumbs in a strainer and shake it, which is what the passage of time is for me. It's like shaking a strainer. All this stuff that's not very big and not very important just kind of dissolves and falls out. But the good stuff stays. The big pieces stay. I had the idea for Under the Dome when I was teaching high school back in 1973. And it was just too big for me. And I was too young for it. And I wrote about 25, 26 pages and put it away. There's a scene at the beginning of this book where this woodchuck gets cut in half when this dome comes down over this town. I had written that part when I was in my early 20s and just sort of recreated it from memory when I wrote the book. So the good stuff stays. So I saw this thing and I wanted to write about it. And this goes, the only reason I'm even talking about this is because Andre was saying, when you wrote Townie, you started to write about baseball and it just sort of grew. Well, this thing stuck around it. And then my method for starting anything is I tell myself the story when I'm laying in bed at night before I go to sleep, I'll tell myself this story. And so at some point, probably nine months after this, because this is what it's like, little piece of grit and it makes a pearl after a while. You just have to give it time. And if it doesn't happen, it doesn't, but a lot of times it does. So about nine months after that, I thought, well, what if a guy did this and did it on purpose and he killed a bunch of people? And what if there was a detective that was sort of at the end of his working career? And this was like a detective who'd had a lot of success with a lot of cases, but he didn't have time to do much with this one because of mandatory retirement. So what if after a while, the guy who did it wrote him a letter and said, I did it. I'm really glad I did it. I enjoyed the screams. I heard their bones breaking as this car went over them. I just absolutely adored the whole experience of killing all these people. The blood went up on the windshield, the headlights broke. I was wearing a mask, so I knew that they wouldn't know who I was. I didn't know if I would get away with it, but I did. I did, and it was great. And here's the thing, this guy saying in this letter, a lot of times guys like me, they do something like this and if the cops don't catch them right away, they say, well, wait, he'll try to do it again and we'll catch him then, but guess what? I don't wanna do it again. Once was enough. I just relived the memories and, you know, it's a really, I was working this letter over in my mind and a really nasty piece of work, you know. But the thing was, what made it nasty, this thing's all tied down. Come on, Jesus Christ, what fun is that? So what I'm thinking is the cop, you know this thing about blue suicide and cops retire and they don't have anything else to do and a lot of them eat their own gun and I thought, here's this cop who's sitting in his house and he gets this letter about six months after he's retired and the only thing he's done is watch daytime TV, you know, like Judge Judy and Dr. Phil. I mean, that would drive me to suicide right there. So, oh yeah, you laugh like you never fucking watched those shows, right? We're all too good for that, aren't we? That's right. You know what I did, I got in about 11 o'clock to this thing and the first thing I did was turn on the prices right, okay? And I got just in time for the big jackpot thing at the end and I'm guessing right along with him. So I'm no better and I don't pretend to be. But anyway, I thought to myself, this is gonna be a short story. That's the only thing I was thinking is I'm gonna tell it in the present tense, it's gonna be this cop, he's gonna get this letter, he's gonna realize he can never solve this and at the end of the letter, which I was gonna say for the end, the guy was gonna say, I know you've still got your service weapon, you're never gonna catch me, so you might as well use it. And I wanted to end the story with the guy putting the gun into his mouth. So now, instead of a 12 page story, I've got a 500 page manuscript because the thing just grew and that's the way it works for me. I don't try to force them to be anything that they don't wanna be.