When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and 'live' with the characters.
As a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you.
Occasionally, I just need to escape from my work or be reminded of the comparative bliss of my own life, so I pick up a novel.
I'm a novelist: I spend a great part of my day pretending to myself that I'm in a different world, being a different person, faced with decisions I pretend I haven't created.
I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.
With my writing, because I live it, I have to be consumed by it, and that means you have to forget your other life, which is constantly pulling you from your work.
It's nice not to have to live a double life.
One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.
It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.