Writers like to feel sorry for themselves, which is easy to do in private, but when called on to feel sorry for ourselves in social situations, we will often do so by sharing terrible book tour stories.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I feel sometimes like a book tour is a slow series of humiliations and that if you're strong you'll come out of it OK.
There is a huge difference between writing a book, which is a private activity I engage in with myself, and wanting to engage in overly intimate personal conversations with strangers, which I pretty much never want to do.
I guess when you write a personal story, people feel compelled to share their own stories.
I didn't write my book, 'I Don't Care About Your Band,' in order to give women a brand-new set of dating rules they need to feel terrible about not abiding. I wrote my book to make the women who read it feel good about themselves, and a little more entitled to be treated well by the guys they go out with.
The comments I most appreciate come from ordinary readers who've happened on one of my books at some time of stress in their lives, and who actually credit the book with helping them through a bad time. It's happened a few times in forty years.
I resisted writing a book for a long time because I didn't want to invade anyone else's privacy or hurt anyone or anger anyone.
As a reader, I'm often put off by authors and story-lines without families or children and all of the angst and joy they bring with them.
What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense. They have no sense that life is fundamentally incomplete rather than accidentally incomplete.
No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid.
I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.