It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I don't think I could have just kept writing the 'Richard Jury' books. It wasn't that I was bored or dissatisfied. I just had to write something else.
One thing you really have to watch as a writer is getting on a soapbox or pulpit about anything. You don't want to alienate readers.
It's exhausting writing nonfiction, particularly when it's personal. It's tiring, always speaking about things that are not necessarily fun retelling.
Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.
Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.
Writers are in the entertainment business, and it gives me lots of pleasure to entertain my readers.
I think writers write for their consciences, they write for their own true audiences, for their souls.
Reviewers try to square the antics of a writer's life with the antics in the fiction. Even satirical verbal play is too often read and admired as autobiographical expression. And thanks to the democratic exposures of the web, it's easier than ever to document private experiences and divulge the most intimate secrets.
I view myself primarily as a trial lawyer who happens to be writing, as opposed to a writer who happens to be a trial lawyer, so the audience is like a jury to me.