I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I didn't get anything published until I was thirty-three, and yet I'd written five novels and six or seven plays. The plays, I should point out, were dreadful.
Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.
I had novels to write, so I wrote them.
I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.
I wrote the worst novel ever.
I did not have a chance to write novels until my youngest child started school fulltime.
Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form - not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living.
My second, third and fourth novels were mistakes, essentially.
I didn't think I would be an exceptional writer, and I thought I might be a useful publisher. I've never regretted it.
I'd never written a novel before, and I wrote a novel, and that turned out OK.