Junot Díaz Hates Writing Short Stories Every writer is cursed or blessed with a unique creative metabolism: the distinctive speed and efficiency with which he or she converts the raw fuel of life into the mystical, dancing blue smoke of art. Junot Díaz's metabolism is notoriously slow. His fuel just sits there, and sits there, and maybe every once in a while gives off a tiny ribbon of damp smoke, until you start to worry that it all got rained on and ruined - and then, 5 or 10 years later, it suddenly explodes into one of the most mesmerizing fires anyone can remember. Díaz's new story collection, "This Is How You Lose Her," is his first book in five years and only his third book over all. It is, like the other two, excellent. In hopes of peeking into his artistic boiler room, I asked Díaz if he would mind bringing along to our interview a few artifacts of writerly inspiration - a lucky pencil, maybe, or some druid crystals - whatever he keeps handy to defeat all the little hobgoblins that try to drive him crazy every time he sits down to write. Díaz arrived walking stiffly - he had major back surgery just a few weeks before - and carrying a fat folder of material pinned under one arm. This turned out to contain a wide variety of documents. There was a small black-and-white photo of his father in a fascist uniform, the discovery of which, Díaz said, inspired "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." There was a bleak photo of the New Jersey steel mill at which Díaz worked during college, a job about which he has tried, but failed, many times to write. There was a photo of his parents posing proudly next to a giant bull. There were newspaper clippings about the "dirty war" in Argentina, a subject that has haunted Díaz since childhood. There were folded-up pieces of scrap paper from his back pocket that he had used to capture ideas as he walked down the street. There were notebooks from the writing of "Oscar Wao," filled with very tall handwriting leaning hard to the right. As Díaz pulled out one document after another, I got the sense that, if only he could have carried a big-enough folder - maybe one the size of a couple of continents - he would have packed in just about everything he has ever seen or heard or (especially) read: libraries of fan fiction, rusty knives, third-world crowds, petroglyphs, secret police. His work is defined by this kind of radical inclusiveness - the language of drug dealers and Tolkien dorks; the problems of destitute Dominican women and their more privileged American sons. This receptivity to all the possible sources of inspiration is what makes Díaz's work both so distinctively rich and, it seems to me, so difficult for him to write. It's like trying to distill the ocean down to a glass of water. "This Is How You Lose Her" is a catalog of wrecked love affairs, multilingual violence, unsatisfying labor and stranded children. It takes place in a floating world between the Dominican Republic and the Eastern Seaboard, between Spanish and English, between the novel and the short story. After much confusion and struggle, the book ends with a moment of inspiration: the narrator, after years of blockage, begins to write a book that he thinks of as (to quote the final story's title) "The Cheater's Guide to Love." It's a book that promises to be almost exactly like "This Is How You Lose Her." And so Díaz's process becomes the product itself. A few weeks before the book's publication, Díaz and I stood at a Midtown bar for a couple of hours - his back made it hard for him to sit - and talked about writing well, writing badly and the mysterious (but always, he insisted, clear) difference between the two. What follows is a condensed version of our conversation, edited lightly for clarity and with all of Díaz's frequent swearwords removed. What was your plan for this new collection? I wanted to capture this sort of cheater's progress, where this guy eventually discovers for the first time the beginning of an ethical imagination. Which of course involves the ability to imagine women as human. So you had your conceptual framework. How did the writing go? Miserable. The stories just wouldn't come. How many stories did you generate in total? I'll tell you what, I can name the stories for "The Cheater's Guide to Love" before "The Cheater's Guide to Love" came. There's a story called "Primo" that was supposed to be at the end of the book - that was a miserable botch. I spent six months on that, and it never came together. There was a story called "Santo Domingo Confidential" that was trying to be the final story, that I spent a year on. I must have written a hundred pages. It was another farrago of nonsense. I wrote a summer story where the kid gets sent to the Dominican Republic while his brother is dying of cancer; he gets sent because his mom can't take care of him. It was a story I called "Confessions of a Teenage Sanky-Panky," which was even worse than all the other ones put together. And that was another 50-page botch. That must be tough. That's why I never want to do this again. It's like you spend 16 years chefing in the kitchen, and all that's left is an amuse-bouche.