The author on watching the global financial crisis in real time and writing a nonfiction book to avoid ruining his novel with too much knowledge
There were two big differences in my writing process when I worked on Capital. The first was that I drafted it on a computer. With my previous novels I wrote the first draft in longhand, on index cards. For my first novel, The Debt to Pleasure, I tried typing out those cards, but I started to come down with carpal tunnel syndrome. I switched to reading out the longhand version into tapes, which I then sent off to be typed up. (Startlingly expensive, by the way.)
Reading the book out loud, I’d hear all sorts of things that I wanted to change, so I’d end up with a second draft just through that process. The finished typescript would come back within days. Then I’d leave it in a drawer until I felt ready to do the editing and revising. Editing is more fun than writing because you know you have a whole book there, you just have to chisel it out of the ice. I followed that process for my first four books.