The writing life is one long, never-ending search for narrative. Well, it's not even a conscious searching. It happens even while you're busy buying groceries and when you're fast asleep. It's a curse.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.
For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.
Life sometimes gets in the way of writing.
Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job.
A lot of writing takes place in the subconscious, and it's bound to have an effect.
It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.
I think that all writing is in search of lost time. I'm starting to realise that very clearly.
The only thing that infuriates me is that I have more unwritten stories in me than I can conceivably write in a lifetime.
My feeling is that writing is, for me, a pathological condition. That could sound like a mystical experience, and it may be a mystical experience, but I have learnt just to go with it.
When the stories come easily and the writing process doesn't feel laboring, that's usually a good sign for me.