What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.
With the novels, I try to write a few pages a day - it doesn't sound much, but it can be difficult if I'm not sure where the story is going.
It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers don't know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.
Every time I finish a book, I forget everything I learned writing it - the information just disappears out of my head.
If writers learn more from their books than do readers, perhaps I may have begun to learn.
Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.
One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.
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 spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.