If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.
An author's characters do what he wants them to do.
I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable, like someone you know you could walk calmly next to through a complicated situation, and he or she would be alive to its meaning and ironies. And you wouldn't even have to mention them out loud to each other.
As a writer, it's a great narrative tool to have that character who is slightly detached but at the same time observant of his reality, because I think that's pretty much what being a writer is - being there, watching and internalizing.
I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing. That doesn't mean my books are autobiographical.
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.
A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.
Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.
I know when I go and see a writer, the first thing I think to myself is, 'Are they the character in the book?' You just can't help it; it's the way people are.
A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel.