I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.
It's very important to understand that the 'Talk' piece was not an excerpt, it was an adaptation, which means I compressed different parts of the book and made a new piece.
When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.
The fact is that at different stages of your life, and under the influence of different inspirations, you write different things. The point is not necessarily to find your voice, which grinds out the same sort of thing again and again, but to find a vehicle for people who are far more important than the author: the characters.
Writers have to be observant. Every nuance, every inflection in a voice, the quality of air, even - they all get mixed up in this soup of the story developing in our minds.
I think what matters most in literary work is the context, not the text.
I'm not at all sure dialogue is meant to advance the story; I know that sometimes it is the story.
Character and story are suggested by the voice in the words themselves.
I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.
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