I think a novelist must be more tender with living or 'real' people. The moral imperative of having been entrusted with their story looms before you every day, in every sentence.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.
Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.
When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.
I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.
You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.
Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.
I always counsel aspiring novelists that passion is the most important quality for a writer to possess - technique can be taught, but that relentless desire to write has to come from within.
Writing is not a matter of choice. Writers have to write. It is somehow in their temperament, in the blood, in tradition.
Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.
Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.