People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, 'Aha, here is the story.'
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
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've seen people around me write books, and somehow they're always in the center of everything that happened; they were the one who made it happen. There's been a lot of those books that didn't really interest me much.
I try to research or make up for myself what happened in any character's life. From when he was born until the first page of the script. I fill in the blanks.
As a reader, when the writer gets sentimental, you drift, because there's something fishy going on there. You recognize a moment that's largely about the writer and the writer's own need to believe in something that might not in fact exist. As a reader, you think, 'Where did the story go? Where did the person I'm reading about go?'
There's almost always a point in a book where something happens that triggers the rest of the plot.
I never think of the reader. I am curious about things; I need to find out, so off I go.
In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.