Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.
Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.
Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.
To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers don't know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.
The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.
The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.
But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.
One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.
For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there's at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary.
No opposing quotes found.