Excerpts from George Flynn’s interview with Bruce Duffie

BD: Are all of your pieces on commission, or are there things that just have to come out of you?
GF: It’s both… If there is no particular commission at any given time and I’m full of ideas, I’ll start working on
something. ... I have pieces mentally stacked up for a long time ahead. Sometimes I can’t wait to get done with commissioned pieces to get
on with other ideas that I find are exciting and interesting that occurred to me, but nobody’s asked me to write that particular piece and I want to do it
anyway.
BD: When you’re working on a piece and you go over it to get it right, how do you know when it’s done?
GF: I generally will have a pretty good idea long before I’ve actually made my first complete sketch — or
draft — what’s going to happen in that piece. That is, I know the overall shape of it. Frequently the piece will come as a single,
large shape… Sometimes some major thing happens. Certainly one of the most interesting experiences that I had was with a piece called
American Rest. Its first version was something like twenty-two to
twenty-four minutes, and I didn’t like it. It didn’t do what I wanted it to do, for some reason, so I revised it and developed it in various
ways, and it turned out to be sixty-five minutes.