The best ideas can sometimes be fleeting ones, even for best-selling author Jonathan Safran Foer.
"You know that feeling when you're in bed at night, and the bed is very warm and the room is very cold, and you're ready to go to sleep and all of a sudden a little idea pops into your head? And you think, well, I could get out of bed and find a pen and write it down, or I could just go to sleep, and probably I'll remember it in the morning, and you wake up the next morning and you never remember it," the author said, about how he gathers his ideas.
Foer stopped in D.C. a few weeks ago on a book tour for his latest novel, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." The book has been on The New York Times Bestseller list for several weeks, and his reading at Politics and Prose bookstore April 11 drew a crowd of more than 250 people.
For Foer, writing is like getting out of bed 100 million times, in the metaphorical sense.
"So much of writing isn't sitting down and waiting to be inspired, it's about not losing things. ... You decide that you're not going to lose your little ideas; you're going to assume they have some importance. ... It's not so much like building something out of nothing, it's more like creating a net so the various ideas you have throughout the course of the day don't just disappear."
Foer grew up in the District's Van Ness area and graduated from Princeton University in 1999. His first novel, published three years ago, made him a New York Times best-selling author at age 25. "Everything is Illuminated," which began as his senior thesis at Princeton, won the National Jewish Book Award, the Guardian First Book Prize and several other awards. Elijah Wood will play Safran Foer in the film "Everything is Illuminated," due out in June.
"The movie is what my book is about on the movie screen, not my book on the movie screen," he said. "It's not the novel that I'm in love with; it's that I care about what I'm writing about."
"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" looks at September 11 from 9-year-old Oskar Schell's eyes: sad, innocent and honest.
When asked how he created Oskar, a character who says he is scared of Arabs and people who wear turbans, and asks his mom to not fall in love again after losing his father on September 11, Foer said he drew from childlike honesty.
"When I was writing, Oskar's character felt honest," he said. "Just like when you were reading it, it felt honest, and when I was writing, that's how it felt."
Foer took the tragedy of September 11 and made it belong to a 9-year-old boy. In the last 15 pages of his novel, Foer reverses the order of pictures showing a man falling from the World Trade Center, making it look like he is floating up. Foer said when he turned the order backwards, he "thought that was the truth about this character, Oskar, and his imagination, and how much he wanted things to be different."
In terms of the controversy that inevitably surfaced from a fictional novel about September 11, Foer said that both artists and journalists should have equal access and responsibility to telling the truth.
"Why did Tom Brokaw show those images on the nightly news?" he said. "Because that's what happened, that was the truth."
Foer began writing this novel about three years ago, and he called the whole process "just editing, editing, editing."
"After I wrote the first word, I felt like I was just editing after that," he said. "For every one page of the book I probably wrote 10 pages."
Foer talked about how he likes to get out of his Brooklyn home to write. He writes in various coffee shops, at friends' houses and even outside. He said he likes to look up and see things happening, or overhear a conversation and sometimes get an idea from that.
Foer described his college experience as interesting.
"I felt very, very lucky and very happy, but it's so easy to have imagined it another way," he said.
He says this because his English professor was Joyce Carol Oats, who became "like a real mentor" to him. She encouraged him to pursue writing, although as a philosophy major he had no intention to do so. He attributes most of his success to luck, as seven publishers and seven agents rejected "Everything is Illuminated" before Houghton-Mifflin took it.
"Every time it was exactly the same book, so if the world had been a little bit different, it never would have been published," he said. "It was hugely discouraging [to get rejected], but you have to stick with what you think is right. You have no choice. Just keep trying.
"You can really only fall back on yourself and your sense of what's good, and what's good writing," he said. "If people agree with you that's really wonderful, and you're very lucky. ... And if they don't, it doesn't mean you're wrong."
Foer said he doesn't search for reviews of his book; he only reads the ones he would normally read, like The New York Times and The Washington Post.
"There's nothing you can do about them, good or bad, and I don't think there's any reason to invest too much in them."
When asked if he had any advice for college students, especially when wondering how one can be successful when it seems like everyone wants to do the same thing, Foer warned against the intricacies of gauging success.
"Don't worry about being successful ... Because success doesn't always come to people who deserve it," Foer said. "You just can't have your sense of your own worth balanced on other people's sense of your worth"
