The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.
In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.
They say every writer really just writes about one thing over and over. I guess my one thing is how the past impacts the present.
There's a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer's head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it's going to.
To me, writing is remembering something funny that happened, or maybe something I said seven years ago.
I think that all writing is in search of lost time. I'm starting to realise that very clearly.
The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.
A lot of writing takes place in the subconscious, and it's bound to have an effect.
I have a great many shortcomings, but writing for something on time has never bothered me.
It's so difficult to write in motion and get rid of the past tense, and also to create a sense of impermanence.