As a writer, I always peel back the layers, go to the most sensitive places uncomfortably close to the heart.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.
I tend to push whatever is looking over my shoulder away when I am writing. It's once the box of books arrive that I say I'm going to be pilloried for this or that. But then you realize it's done, and there is nothing I can do. I'm proud of the book.
My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.
I have to feel what I'm writing, right down to the core.
When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way.
I do not wear my emotions on my sleeve; I write about them.
I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion.
Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it.
As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.
There are a lot of elements when you're writing, or when I'm writing, that are sitting in the back of your mind. I try to let them stay there, because they find their way in more naturally that way.