Interview: a novelist who writes at five in the morning.

I met my guest in a coffee shop in Berkeley that he chose because it has, in his words, the kind of quiet only the second floor of a coffee shop can have. We spoke for two hours. The transcript is twenty-two thousand words. This is the bones of it.

MC: You write fiction. You also write code. Do they pull from the same place?

RS: They are the same place, except the code knows when it's wrong. The fiction has to be told by someone else.

MC: What does a slow novel mean, to you?

RS: It means you wrote the third draft. Most novels you read are first drafts that the writer talked themselves into believing were finished. A slow novel is the one where you let yourself see, after eighteen months, that the second chapter is the first chapter, and you cut the actual first chapter, and you do not regret it.

A slow novel is the one where you let yourself see that the second chapter is the first chapter, and you cut the actual first chapter, and you do not regret it.

MC: You've talked about working with software the same way. The metaphor holds?

RS: Almost completely. The difference is that software has tests. The novel has only the friend you trust to read it before the agent does. The friend is the test suite, and the friend has a life.

MC: The question I always want to ask people who do two things: do you ever resent one of them?

RS: Constantly. But never for long. The one you resent is usually the one that's about to teach you something. I am almost always grateful by the next morning. Almost.

We spoke about three of his unpublished projects, two of which I have agreed not to write about here. The third is a novel set in a software company, and he is, by his own admission, fifteen drafts in. I will know when I'm done, he said. I am not done.