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In this case I really had a very clear idea of the events and what was going to crucial detail that was going to be noticed and how that I just saw the whole thing came to me and I think that almost never happens and I I didn't write it immediately. You know I had to just wait a few years but it was like in that notebook that all writers keep but we never actually about 5 percent of the time ever actually get to the ideas that like this going to be the greatest short story ever like it's going to be better than the dead. But I never get back to those ideas but in this case it just stuck around long enough and I was at work on a dying novel as I so frequently am and I finally said OK I want to write this story is almost like a treat. And there it was it was still there probably because I thought a lot about my own experience in therapy and also thought a lot about my dad and my sort of complicated love for him and out popped. F for me the start was also kind of a treat that I would let myself come back to every now and then when I was doing the hard work of trying to write other stories I'd started it.

Boy the first draft of the story was written in 2004 I think and I think I had I was kind of playing with this crazy clown voice because it seemed like fun it was different when I've been doing it I just wanted to I want to do something different than than some of the writing I've been doing. So I suddenly had this clown and I've had these ideas for stories about lion tamers and mentioned some of this in the contributors know like I had a lion tamer going on a cruise or a lion tamer speed dating a lion tamer visiting his parents and none of it ever work but I thought I don't like this lion tamer idea. And so suddenly the clip of this kind of clown voice starts talking about this lion tamer than it was we really can't stand and there's a love interest in you know that gets involved in an earlier version of the story they were. There was an ex-girlfriend and there's a lot of other stuff that happened. And I got to research circus lingo and that was fun but it was just it was that it was sort of fun and I remember very clearly that I wrote the story. At the end of my first year that in graduate school and one of my professors there Chris Tillman who's a Boston native. Had written

just in his very kind of fine pencil scribble at the bottom psychologically thin. It was his comment on draft one. And so for a long time I just sat in the drawer but every time I finished something I'd come back to the story I'd come back to and I'd kind of hack away at it and I got rid of this whole intro the class how to get rid of this other stuff. And so I tried to psychologically thicken it up a little bit. Which is one of the tasks I have but I also just sort of found it. It's so it's some point it wasn't just this kind of crazy lark although it was that it was always fun to have that. I really started to care a lot about the characters and kind of tried to let that guide where the story was going you know what would happen next because there was in the first version was very heavily plotted and I realized that a lot of the plot stuff that was in there the complications didn't really need to happen. I was just trying to figure out what would they say to each other when would they talk to each other what would arise out of the some of these conversations. And then I put it aside again because it seemed like it was just this crazy story about the circus and I don't often write about the circus. Maybe I should write more about the circus. And so after enough

brakes finally about five years later I had pretty much the version that you see here it took a long time to get to it. It was sort of in fits and starts but when I finally kind of put my my mind but I realized that this story had something to it that kind of kept calling me back to it and you know it was it really was a treat to work on because it was it was an element of fun and then there was an element of danger with it whether I could pull it off. And once I kind of wanted to face up to that danger to see if I could make this story work and not just be this failed effort. I really started to care about it. OK my next question is for all of you what is the most difficult thing about writing for you. You can feel it. Oh gosh I mean realistically the list is the list is so long. No actually that's not that's not entirely true. The hardest the hardest thing for him for me about about

writing has always been the urge to go fast when I know deep down that I need to go slow. I have always been either plagued or blessed depending on how you look at it. With having it with having a good ear and not quite as good an eye and as a result of that I've always. When I've what I have when I put myself in the world of my characters they start speaking and when. When I'm writing badly I'm taking dictation and it's not that what they're telling me. It's not that what there's anything wrong with what they're telling me it's that I'm just.