As readers of "How and Why" might guess, this essay developed one day while I was running and found myself trying to figure out exactly how I could get as close as possible to saying something of meaning about my life as an essayist. All I knew at first was that I didn't want to write an essay about craft. I wanted instead to see if I could show why I felt compelled to write what I wrote, how the germ of an essay came to me, how it expanded, and how I came to set it down on paper. Did I succeed? I think I was clearer in showing propensity and genesis and less in explaining process. I mean, this essay surely wouldn't work in a primer. On the other hand, I enjoy reading how other writers work. Sometimes I share the same quirks as another writer. (Sloppy clothes, a favorite pen.) Sometimes I am reassured that my way of doing things isn't hopelessly strange. (As a young writer, I was immensely relieved to read that there were other writers, "real writers," who didn't write straight through, from beginning to end.) And sometimes I incorporate someone else's strategies into my own.

I write fiction and screenplays as well as nonfiction. Neither of these genres form the way essays do for me. Fiction does not spring from a problem or grow out of my propensity for mulling. It grows instead out of my interest in character. However, I use the same techniques in fiction and in creative nonfiction. For instance, in "How and Why" I made an attempt at creating characterization, particularly in the "why" section, where I give my short bio of the birth and growing up of a young essayist.

I love seeing the range and scope of contemporary creative nonfiction. The genre is lively and provocative, less constrained than in the past. It's an error, I think, to assume that the growth of interest in creative nonfiction has to do solely with readers' prurient interest in confessional writing, or their obsession with "truth" in an increasingly complex world, but rather that in creative nonfiction, writers are writing about worlds, interior and exterior, that have not been explored in fiction. Irving Yalom, a psychiatrist and author of a book called "Love's Executioner" once commented that fiction did not seem to render the depth and strangeness of human experience that he had seen as a psychiatrist. I think the best of creative nonfiction is beginning to capture some of this range of experience.