I was in love with the idea of love, so I created elaborate fictions for my relationships - fictions that allowed me to believe that what any given paramour and I shared looked a lot like love.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
In course of time my first novel appeared. It was a love story.
I love my life, my family and my friends, and I'm drawn to 'relationship' novels because of their affirming focus on the power of love to heal wounds and transform lives.
It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.
At some point, I fell in love. Shortly thereafter, I got my heart broken. Sniff, sniff. And I realized at a young age - no matter what any adult literary critic would have us believe about female strength and autonomy - there is no test to strength of character like love.
I've lost much of my heart and the spark or fire that once 'created,' or produced, the art of fiction.
Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.
I mostly associated video game storytelling with unforgivable clumsiness, irredeemable incompetence - and suddenly, I was finding the aesthetic and formal concerns I'd always associated with fiction: storytelling, form, the medium, character. That kind of shocked me.
Most everything that happens to me in any significant sense finds its way into my fiction.
I like fiction. I love all sorts of love stories, I think. I even watched '17 Again.'
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.