That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
As a writer, I always peel back the layers, go to the most sensitive places uncomfortably close to the heart.
It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.
As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different.
The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn't on the surface.
Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader.
It's really an interesting problem, trying to earn a living and serve art and serve kids. What I try to create are these visual layers so that readers feel the possibility exists that there might be something in the book they never saw before.
If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.
The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.
A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel.
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.