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from the fine but rather obscure independent company, Horizon Press, to Knopf. In those ten years, I'd had another notion for a novel—let's face it, it was an idea; that's why it was not going anywhere—based on the fact that my son had been born and looked just like me—a little externalization of self. I wrote an awful short story about it—but one that led me to consider how American army men went to Vietnam for a year: you drop into war, and they pluck you out again. There were legions of Vietnamese women in the gray area between prostitute and aspiring girlfriend, and they didn't understand birth control or didn't give a damn, so there were a lot of children born of fleeting connections—"children of the dust." There were men who lived for thirty years in America not knowing that they had a child, now an adult somewhere in the world. They would go to their graves probably not giving it a thought, and certainly not knowing that they had a part of themselves in the world. Still, that's not enough for a novel. And it was a bad short story.
    Actually twelve years had passed since I was in Vietnam—and now two separate things that had gotten me to meditate there, the prisoner and the child, suddenly came together in my unconscious. Only when those things converged was there the fullness of a novel. On Distant Ground is about an army intelligence captain being tried in a court martial for having tracked down and set free a Viet Cong prisoner—prompted to do so by seeing graffiti written on a wall. His yearning is for a connection with the other, and this yearning has been intensified by a son who looks just like him, though he is a man of inherent emotional distance and aloofness toward everyone around him including his wife. During the trial he becomes obsessed with the memory of a Vietnamese woman who mysteriously broke off their affair, and he wonders if he may be one of those people unknowingly with a child in Vietnam. He goes back—he's on bail—to Saigon. The city falls while he's there, and he's trapped in Communist Vietnam, looking for a child who may not exist.
    To choose the novel or short story form without it being driven by a vision from your unconscious is a big mistake. If you are to propel your work without some willed preconception, then nothing must be preconceived, including the form, the content, and especially memories of the events of your life that produced the inspiration. You will get legitimate artistic
    inspiration from your unconscious, and often part of you will know where it came from. But then you have to resist going hack, finding all the old notes, and working out what really happened in the past.
    Be alert to the fact that you must achieve a trancelike state in order to write from your unconscious. You'll also have to know what to look for in the stuff that's coming off of the tips of your fingers. You can see the bad stuff going up on the screen; you know where it's coming from. You don't just let yourself get away with it.
    And, of course, writing is also rewriting. I need to say a final word now on the question of editing and rewriting: you might say to yourself, OK, that's fine, all that white-hot-center stuff spilling out in the composition, but when I go back to edit and revise, how do the dreams fit in there? Or do they?
    They absolutely do. What you need to do now is to think of yourself as a reader encountering a strange work. You've got to understand your own memory and figure out what it takes for you to forget what you have written, sufficiently that you can revisit it as reader. That's the key to editing yourself. This is where having a bad memory will serve you well. If you reread your work without having forgotten it, you'll be analyzing your own work in all those lit-crit ways. I'm lucky. I literally forget my sentences after I've written them. I will write a sentence; I'll write another; I'll go back and read the previous sentence, and I won't know where the hell it