“I'm just trying to make them laugh,” says Steven Wright. “I don't focus on emotion.” The 68-year-old comedian and actor, who’s built a career on setting the bar for the definition of “deadpan,” has for decades been known for his observational humor that rarely treads into the kind of personal storytelling that’s marked other comics of his generation. But when he sat down to write his debut novel “Harold,” Wright found himself tapping into a new side of his psyche.

“There's a lot of sensitivity in there,” Wright admitted during a recent “Salon Talks” conversation. “It is more emotion than the stand-up.” Told from the perspective of a third grader over the course of one December day in the mid '60s, “Harold” has plenty of the author’s trademark surreal wit (Harold, for example, muses that all art was modern at one point), but it also brims with a depth and a wistful melancholy that will catch Wright’s fans unexpected. "This was way more going into what I really think about all things,” Wright said.

Yet the comedian, who Rolling Stone has called one of the greatest stand-ups of all time, isn’t going back on what comes most naturally to him. “I made my own rules up when I started to stand-up,” he recalled. “One of the things I did to myself is I didn't want the joke attached to time. If time was like a clothesline, I wanted to do it for as long as ever.” As he put it, “The speed of light is never going to go out of style. Gravity, lint, signs, time itself, is not going to go out of style.” Watch my "Salon Talks" episode with Wright here on YouTube.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

A lot of the reviews of “Harold” say, “It's odd and wonderful.” “It’s weird and wonderful." If you were to describe it in four words, what would those four words be, Steven?

I would say, surrealism and innocence.

Tell me about Harold. This is a story of a third-grader. He is a unique, special boy.

I just write anything that comes into my head. I drink coffee, and then my mind goes crazy. One day I wrote, "Harold was in third grade, Harold . . ." For no reason, things come into my mind, and I just write them down. And then, I started going longer, and then I didn't do it for a while, and then it went a little bit longer, and a little bit longer, and I thought, "Maybe this can be some kind of a story," not thinking I'm going to write a book. Then it just kept going, I would work on it, not work on it. Then it got to a length where I thought, "I'm going to see how long this can go." Still not thinking it was a – and then it just kept going, going and going. And I started to be taken into this world I was creating.

I liked the world I was creating, and I like to go visit it every day. It was like reading a book, you know, when you read a book, you go into that world. It was like that, except I was making the world up. And in my history of stand-up, if I think of a joke, it's because I saw a sign or I heard a word, or I was reading a book and a word . . . I love words. Words will just jazz me, like a word that has an odd sound and a meaning, like "electrolysis." I have a whole joke, because I saw the word "electrolysis" written down.

But the jokes float. I don't sit down to write jokes. I just go through the world, and there's just stuff. Like, from the minute you wake up to when you go to sleep, thousands of pieces of information go past you. The world is like a mosaic painting, and some of these squares can be connected that weren't connected before. They can be connected by the word, or it has two different meanings. And so this was different, because I started to daily, on purpose, sit down to try to see what else could happen with him.

And you didn't start it out in a notebook or on a document. This book began its life in kind of a unique place.

Yes, on my phone. I wrote the whole book on my phone.

Not just on your phone, but on the platform formerly known as Twitter, right?

Oh, that was the very beginning. Yes. That was why I even wrote anything. Thirty years ago I wrote a story for Rolling Stone called “The Beach.” It was a fairy tale about how the beach was invented. And every few years I would read it, and I would think I should write something else, but I never would. And then I got the Twitter thing, and then I read "The Beach" again, and I thought, rather than jokes on Twitter, let me try to write........

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