Rival Planet

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JOHN WRAY

To write “Lowboy,” which takes place in the New York City subway, Brooklyn-based novelist John Wray rode trains all over the city while pecking out a first draft on his laptop computer. He mainly rode the F, C and B trains, though “there was a time when I was really into the G,” he says. He often sat in a corner near the conductor’s booth with his headphones on. He worked like this, often for six hours a day, for nearly a year.

Initially, he wrote on the train not for research purposes, but to cut himself off from distractions like email and phone calls. Then the people and conversations he observed on the subway began to creep into the book, a novel about a paranoid schizophrenic teenager. One of the characters, a heavy-set homeless woman, is based on a woman Mr. Wray used to see at the Stillwell Avenue stop in Brooklyn. Bits of dialogue he overheard appear verbatim in the novel, including a strange conversation about how prospective homeowners should spend the night in a house before buying it in order to check the property for paranormal activity.

Writing on a noisy, crowded train was hard at times, but it was pleasant compared to the conditions under which he wrote his first novel, he says. In 1996, after losing his job in an art gallery, Mr. Wray lived in a tent in a rat-infested basement in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood. He wrote in the tent on an old 1940s typewriter. “I tried to approximate every cliché of the struggling novelist possible,” he says.

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How Junot Diaz, Kazuo Ishiguro and Orhan Pamuk Write - WSJ.com