Dolan talks inspiration with Matthew Thompson for Electric Literature’s WAX column.
An excerpt:
I like breaking rules, and you can’t break them if there aren’t any. Ads, spam, dismissed genres, how-to guides and brochures all provide such rules. These rules each amount to a kind of game that one can enter into and play. For me, the process is distinctly human: we recognize limitations or obstacles in the world and endeavor to circumvent or undo them. There’s great satisfaction in creating and reading works that mimic this process. It is inherently playful, yes, but I don’t think play is childish. Play is an almost spiritual undertaking. When we give ourselves over to a set of rules, or follow them to their conclusion (or engineer a way to use them in a manner beyond their initial intention), we access something new or even impossible.
Read the whole shebang over at EL.