He remembered a lot of the events from that summer of 1969 in our New Jersey town, and kept asking things like, "Did your brother really get jailed in Syracuse for protesting the Vietnam War?" (jailed in Buffalo, but basically true), and, "Who were those two girls at the swim club?" and then he named four possibilities. A friend from childhood read War and Watermelon last week and got in touch with me about it. RW: Yeah, there's a great deal of me in every protagonist, and I draw on events from real life. JE: Is it fair to say most of your writing is memoir-based and if so, how focused are you on the facts and how much is poetic license? After a chapter or so, I start to think about where it might be going. RW: I begin with a character in a situation and then start winging it. JE: When you begin a new novel, do you already know the beginning, middle, and end? Do you have your time period down? Or do you just wing it? JE: Do you have any manuscripts hidden in a drawer that for whatever reason will never see the editor's desk? I finished an actual novel manuscript at about age 30.
RW: Well, I wrote a lot of comic books in third grade. JE: How old were you when you finished your first manuscript, and I mean one that you could hold up and say, “Wow! I wrote a book.”
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