I think, with most writers, their neurosis is finishing things. I have a different neurosis. I'm terribly anxious when it's not finished. Then I become really difficult to live with.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I think writers are very anxious.
Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.
All writers are obviously neurotic... For various reasons, writers retreat into an imaginary world because they find ordinary life rather difficult or boring or both.
For me, most of the anxiety and difficulty of writing takes place in the act of not writing. It's the procrastination, the thinking about writing that's difficult.
When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.
Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.
In the end, I am quite normal. I don't have odd habits. I don't dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don't talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer's block, all those things that we hear about writers.
I write a lot because, if I don't, I start to panic, and I calm down when I write.
When it grows dark, we always need someone. This thought, the product of anxiety, only comes to me in the evenings, just when I'm about to end my writerly explorations.
In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.
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