I was just about to begin writing 'Mirror Mirror', within about a week of it, when September 11, 2001 happened. I found myself incapable of caring about fiction-making for a number of months.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.
I had been writing fiction since I was in eighth grade, because I loved it.
I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did, and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.
I always wanted to write fiction. Always. As far back as I can remember it's been integral to my sense of myself - everything else was always a displacement activity.
I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story.
Getting to the point where I was ready to write a book has been about a 20-year journey of being, really honestly, too afraid to try - which I think is pretty common for people who are trying to write a large piece of fiction.
I began writing fiction when I started running out of material in my own life.
I'm still an old-school reporter at heart. Writing fiction satisfies my journalistic need to hear and relay the testimony of everyday people at the center of events.
Writing fiction is the 'job' I try to keep at the center of things. The movie stuff has been a wonderful accident, though not entirely bizarre, either, as I have done some work in film before, and even directed a ridiculous, cable-access feature back in my 20s.
I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.