On Lauren Groff

On re-writing I’m a physical learner. I learn from writing them, not reading them. When I write a new draft, I don’t like to feel I’m tied to any previous version. That’s why I don’t use a computer to write. The text looks, on the screen, too much like a book. It’s not a book—it’s a bad first draft of something that could one day be a book. Our human impulse is to control everything, but fiction seems to me to be about allowing an element of mystery into the text. Even if I tried to look back at my...