I like to fantasize that I write in a spiral notebook, longhand, seated at a steel desk in a locked room—all alone.  In these fantasies, I am wearing a turtle neck and a fedora.  I’m smoking cigarettes and sipping Scotch, neat.  There’s jazz on: old-timey stuff from the twenties, like Bix Beiderbecke.

And then, voila—genius, magnificence.  Like a long, leggy deer, divine inspiration leaps from my head.  I don’t even know where it came from but it is there.  A sign that I am touched by God.

But this scenario is just not true.  I actually sit cross-legged on a purple couch in my living room, often in my boxers.  My Mac is perched on my lap—growing hotter.   So hot that I put a pillow underneath.

And I’m never alone.  I’m always showing stuff to friends.  You gotta write with a team.

Once a week, I meet with my friends.  They don’t know they’re my team:  narrative commandos with ninja moves and mutant powers.  But they are.  I’m lucky because they know detective fiction way better than I do.  Also, they know the nitty-gritty side of the fashion industry.  So they can tell me if I’m way off base.  And they’re smart as whips. I take notes when they are pontificating.  I am making my pilgrimage to the well with my buckets.  It happens once a week because that’s when I run dry and I must return to the source.

Then, I sit on my couch and try to make their ideas into story lines.  And repeat the cycle.

I guess I’ll never be the kind of genius that sits in a locked room and strings together sentences.  I’m not cut of that cloth.  In his early apprenticeship, John Cheever actually made it a point to sit in a room until lunchtime every day, for five years and write.  The room was in the basement of his New York apartment.  He even put on a suit.  Then took it off and slipped it onto a hanger.  He didn’t want to ruin that suit.  It was his only suit.

In the introduction to his Pulitzer Prize winning collection of short stories, John Cheever made this surprising revelation:  “a great many of my stories were written in boxer shorts.”  So at least I have something in common with a great genius.