Found this inspiring conversation between Willem Dafoe and Michael Ondaatje. Great insight into the creative process.

WD Is there anything you consistently notice about a piece when it’s done? How do you know when to stop working? I read your novels before your poetry, and when I went to the poetry, it was so precise. When you talk about this long editing process with the novel, I can’t imagine it.

MO I do take very much care. Once I finish a story, which takes around four or five years, it’s all over the place. The order is not necessarily the order it ends up in. So the editing stage then begins, shaving it down, until you’ve got a cleaner line of the story. What more can you remove without losing the story? I have a tendency to remove more and more in the process of editing. Often I’ll write the first chapter last, because it sets up the story. The last thing I wrote in Coming Through Slaughter was “His geography,” almost like a big landscape shot, with buried clues you can pick up later.

WD As you edit, how much does it shift around? Particularly The English Patient where you’re dealing with so many points of view. How much do you fall in love with different characters? Or do you discipline yourself to maintain an overview right away?

MO I go wherever it takes me. I try everything. I completely test it, jostle it, so I’m not locked into the rhetoric, or the order I wrote it in. In a way this is what Anthony and Walter Murch did in the last stages of the film, taking a visual from one scene and putting it in another scene and creating something different. It is collaging and piecing.

WD Do you usually start out with a few rough ideas, central images?

MO I don’t have a rough idea. It’s usually an image.

Read the whole conversation here at Bomb