I know you're supposed to hide your influences, but I suppose I see writing as riffing, really, about whatever you have been reading or thinking about that day or that week.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I can't tell you any more than any other writer can tell you why they write, and I don't know what my influences are.
I think sometimes I write to impress my influences. Whether they're actually acquaintances of mine, people that I think will hear the record or not, I still write - not to imitate my influences - but to write something that would live up to their standards.
I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.
The act of writing is a way of tricking yourself into revealing something that you would never consciously put into the world. Sometimes I'm shocked by the deeply personal things I've put into books without realizing it.
Generally, my writing is influenced by living, by absorbing everything that happens to me and my actions.
I wrote for so many years in a bubble, the way everyone does, and there were large swaths of time where you think you're doing this for nothing. An audience is crucial, a back and forth with the invisible readers.
The things I write are combinations of all of the people that have been influences to me.
The act of writing is a kind of catharsis, a liberation, but I never really concerned myself with that. I write because it interests me.
I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.
If I think about the writers I love or might be influenced by, I can't write at all, so I pretend there aren't any.
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