Courtney B asked Daniel Quinn:

How do you decide on a format for your work? In Providence, you revealed that you wrote "Ishmael" several times before landing on the story you published. I loved Ishmael, it was the first of your books I read, but I wonder what the first draft would have been like? And the Ishmael trilogy seems quite different from Beyond Civilization or The Holy. How do you choose?

Daniel Quinn I didn't "write Ishmael several times." In effect, I wrote seven books before (finally) writing the one called Ishmael. They were not in any sense "drafts." I've called them versions, but they weren't intended as versions, each was intended to be THE book. The Ishmael trilogy were novels because that was the most effective form for what I wanted to accomplish. In Beyond Civilization I was doing something entirely different, something not at all suited to fiction; after struggling with many forms, I found the "one micro-essay per page" format to be best suited to this collection of ideas (but it would not have been suited to the ideas in Providence).

The novel was not a form I "chose" for After Dachau and The Holy. They're not teachings disguised as novels (as might conceivably be said of Ishmael, The Story of B, and My Ishmael ). They're novels, period, because I'm a novelist as well as a teacher.

In general, a writer with a poem in mind writes a poem, with a novel in mind writes a novel, with an essay in mind writes an essay, with an autobiography in mind writes an autobiography. It isn't a matter of "deciding" BETWEEN a poem, a novel, an essay, an autobiography.

If I have some ideas that I want to express about, say, Permaculture, I write an essay (not a poem or a novel) – that's what any author does. If I have a story idea, I write a short story or a novel – and that too is what any author does.

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