New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Writing is such a solitary thing, so it's nice, when I'm discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.
Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.
God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.
Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.
Getting to the point where I was ready to write a book has been about a 20-year journey of being, really honestly, too afraid to try - which I think is pretty common for people who are trying to write a large piece of fiction.
I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.
One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.
Back in the 1980s, when I was a lowly editorial assistant by day and trying to be a novelist by night, no god reigned so supreme as the god of literary prose.
To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.
No opposing quotes found.