If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I think there are readers out there and I don't think the book is dead. And more importantly I don't think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.
The process of writing a book has given me a whole new reverence for writers. Mechanically, it is a brutal process; emotionally, it's incredibly healing.
I think after you write something and you're finished with it, there is a sense of loss. That this is a world I can't really re-enter the way that I could when I was working on it. The covers of the book close it to the writer.
As a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you.
Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.
With the novels, I try to write a few pages a day - it doesn't sound much, but it can be difficult if I'm not sure where the story is going.
A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.
I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.
It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story.
When a book goes well, it abandons me. I am the most abandoned writer in the world.