Having a day job again I found really kind of fueled my fiction, because it became almost this forbidden thing where I had to sneak off and do it in private.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I love what I do, but it occurs to me I may have handed over a large portion of my life to fiction.
I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.
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 love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.
I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.
I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.
It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.
My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.
In my thirties I found myself, to use a colloquial fiction, in a suburban house at the foothills of the Dublin mountains. Married and with two little daughters, I led a life which would have been recognizable to any woman who had led it and to many others who had not.
I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story.
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