In the author's words "American Dreams was a radical experiment, because the whole idea was to let the stories erupt and evolve on their own. I would draw a word and then use that word in the most interesting sentence I could think of, and then create the next most interesting (and connected) sentence I could think of, and so on until the energy ran out. Much to my surprise, I wrote an entire chapter the first time I tried this technique. It was as if I had discovered a magic lamp. And that's the way it continued: a single word created each chapter. As I created more characters, I made a chart and assigned them numbers and then I rolled dice to decide which character would run into which other character. After all, in real life you're constantly running into new people. Who knows why?"