100 things about a novel

Alexander Chee waxes poetic about the way novelists work. Here’s the first few things:

1. Sometimes music is needed.
2. Sometimes silence.
3. This is probably because a novel is a piece of music, like all written things, the language demanding you make a sound as you read it.
4. Sometimes I have written them on subways, missing stops, like people do when reading.
5. It begins for me usually with the implications of a situation. A person who is like this in a place that is like this, an integer set into the heart of an equation and new values, everywhere.

Read the rest.