Mountain Goats' John Darnielle discusses first novel

When the longlist for the National Book Awards was announced last month, it had the usual suspects -- books by previous winner Richard Powers and two Pulitzer winners, Jane Smiley and Marilynne Robinson. And there was one big surprise: the novel "Wolf in White Van" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24) by John Darnielle, who is known as the man behind the Mountain Goats, a lyrically gifted indie rock band.

"Wolf in White Van" is the story of Sean Phillips, a young man who has survived a tremendously disfiguring accident. He's developed a rich imagination, enough to see a story in the cracks in a ceiling. To support himself, he invents a mail-order role-playing game. Yet he finds that the scope of his imagination has consequences in the real world.

What has it been like being longlisted for the National Book Award?

Oh, my God; I just didn't see it coming. ... It would be hard for me to convey how it felt, to me, a former young man who wanted only to become a writer, to have that happen with this book. It's incredible. I still can't believe it.

I'm in a contest and one of my competitors is Marilynne Robinson. I'm not going to beat Marilynne Robinson. She is a person of profound insight. ... Obviously, it would be a huge honor to win, but look at the company I'm keeping. It would be rude to want more.

The mail-order game Sean creates is a science fiction story. Have you been tempted to create the game in full?

I was doing all that and there was no game. There was just a guy who had survived a catastrophic injury. At one point, when he started to grow older, I thought, how does he make any money? Asking questions like you would in a comic improv class. I got this idea, mail order. Back in the '90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle. Later I looked it up and it turns out there is such a thing as a play-by-mail game.

Could you compare the experience performing as a musician and performing as an author?

The music we [the Mountain Goats] play, there's a real cathartic release. We get up there and turn the energy and the volume up, and the idea is to push ourselves and everyone else in the room through a bottleneck with us. It's an exciting release. ...

Readings are more like weaving a tapestry. Possibly people are getting a cathartic release -- but music is physical. Music pummels you. It's got a beat, it's loud. Whereas this is more cerebral.

What's your writing process?

I write on any available surface, paper bags, anything. In the notes function of my phone. That's where I get a lot of good ideas for the book, because I'll be changing planes and write a three-word phrase, and then when I next see it, some of what I meant by it will have gone missing and I'll have to reconstruct it.

Some writers have very carefully wrought writing rituals. Are you able to work on the longer narrative of your book while on tour with the band?

I don't have a choice -- that's my day job. I work best in the morning, so I'd be writing in hotel rooms. . . . While I was writing a book I had a 1-year old -- the idea of writing in a soundless chamber is a fantasy world. While I write my son is pounding the piano with his fists, so I learn to work with it. At one point, I had some time booked at some retreat, bed-and-breakfast type place, but I never went.

I don't know if I've ever heard anyone describe being a musician as their day job before.

But it is -- that's what I do for a living. To me, creative work is labor, like any other kind of labor. It's got value and it takes your time and it's useful to people, depending. The difference is if I make a wrench, anybody who picks it up can use that wrench. With creative work, not everybody's creative work is going to be useful to everybody -- it will only be useful to the people who connect with it. It's still labor. ... I was very proud to be able to say this is what I do for a living.