Not to sound egomaniac or anything, but just to get under people's skin like that, and for them to believe in you and believe strongly enough to write... it's flattering and it helps you during the day.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
As a writer, you need a strong sense of self-belief. And when it comes to writing, I've always had that.
Lots of people want to have written; they don't want to write. In other words, they want to see their name on the front cover of a book and their grinning picture on the back. But this is what comes at the end of a job, not at the beginning.
The whole point of writing is to have something in your gut or in your soul or in your mind that's burning to be written.
People imagine that there are rituals, like lighting candles or sacrificing chickens. They really just want to know what the magic formula is for writing. I inevitably disappoint them by saying you just put your butt in the chair, and you write 500 words a day, and then you get up and repeat it the next morning.
I write for myself, and I write for my friends and people who I have a connection with. I try to give some dignity to peoples' lifestyles that tend to be ignored.
It's so much easier to write for a person in your life than to write for some imagined readership, so you write something that's more intimate and true.
I have no idea why I write. The old standards are: I like to express my feelings, stretch my imagination, earn money.
The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.
To write something you have to feel it and know it, and that's not comfortable.
Writing is just something I've always done. It's just kind of the reality of who I am.