In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
One of the things the novel can do is address big questions in ways that are accessible to people. It's not that I want to teach people, but these are the things that interest me, and this is my medium for exploring ideas, and I think the potential of novels to do that is massive.
Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.
The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.
If you're a novelist, as I am in real life, you're usually so desperate for any kind of feedback.
I love to write a book out of questions; in fact, I think it's the only way my writing can operate, if there's something I don't understand.
Sometimes you make a connection with a writer or a piece of material, and there's not much to ask.
Fiction is often most powerful when the author is exploring an issue - and not writing like a know-it-all who has the perfect answer.
When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.
If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.
By asking a novel question that you don't know the answer to, you discover whether you can formulate a way of finding the answer, and you stretch your own mind, and very often you learn something new.
No opposing quotes found.