Bret Easton Ellis

Ellis, the author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho, talks shop with Vice Magazine.

From the piece...

But is there an emotional satisfaction sometimes? Do you ever feel excitement when you’re writing or is it all very technical?

No, it’s both. It’s technical and it’s emotional. I would say it’s much more emotional during the outline days of the process. The outline, in my case, is usually longer than the finished book. Tons of notes, a lot of ideas, a lot of them discarded. And then once that outline is pretty much completed, then it does become a technical process where you’re following the outline and you’re trying to organize it in a way that is pleasing to you in novel form. And so yeah, it is emotionally satisfying.

It must be. The final passages in both Imperial Bedrooms and Lunar Park pack a lot of emotional impact. They’re moving. Especially the end of Imperial Bedrooms, where Clay is talking about how he never liked anyone and how he’s afraid of people. And then there are these things that are embedded, like he talks about “moving the game as you play,” which is a callback to the quote from the band X that opens Less Than Zero, so there’s this full-circle thing happening too.

Right. It’s planned, you know. I mean, you kind of know the ending before you begin actually writing the book. Usually I know the last line of the book before I begin that technical process of going through the outline.

That’s interesting.

Yeah, I usually know the first line and the last line of the book before I begin it.

Do you really belabor what to lose and what to keep as you’re going from the outline to the novel?

Well, some people would say I throw in everything. [laughs] Some people complain, “Why is Glamorama 700 pages long?” But one of the things that I’m really interested in is the narrator. I’m interested in the function of the narrator, the person telling the story. I’ve never written a novel in the third person. My work is just a series of narrators, and I kind of give the books over to them.