Despite its challenges, the novel offers an opportunity to live in one story for years of your imaginative life. There's a tremendous richness to that.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.
Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.
A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
Write that novel. Start that business you've always wanted to. The ultimate high of life is the commitment to pursuing something.
I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.
One of the fantastic things about books, fiction or non-fiction, is the way they give you a chance to look into different lives.
A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.
I think most writers will say that at the start of each book they think, 'I'm not sure I can do this.' But eventually, you reach a magical point where the story suddenly becomes real to you, and you become totally invested in it.
I love the novel because it's like a love affair. You can just fall into it and keep going, and you never know where it's going to take you.
The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.