This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If I'm not clear with the character, I can't do anything with it. But once I get that character, the possibilities are endless. When you have such a defined character, I feel like I can actually read the phone book and make it funny.
One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.
I always swore I would never write a book. But I read Clare Balding's and it was really interesting and so prettily written and lovely and not too revealing. I went to her book launch and met her editor who said 'why don't you think about it? You can do it however you want, based on your characters or you.'
If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.
When I sit down to talk to men's magazines, there's a certain character that I play. She's not fully fleshed out - she doesn't have her own name - but she shows up to do men's-magazine interviews.
In one book, CACHALOT, just for my own amusement, every character is based directly on someone I have known.
At my first library job, I worked with a woman named Sheila Brownstein, who was The Reader's Advisor. She was a short, bosomy Englishwoman who accosted people at the shelves and asked if they wanted advice on what to read, and if the answer was yes, she asked what writers they already loved and then suggested somebody new.
I've always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.
Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.
No opposing quotes found.