The whole purpose of writing a book is to be understood - if other people write about you, they try to guess why you did things, or they hear things from other people.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Writing a book is very personal. It's a very personal relationship. A book will start with something as simple as two men talking about work. That gets the fire going. Sustaining that fire is the hard work. It takes attention and empathy to hone the characters.
Writing books can be very individual - one might strike you as helpful that someone else found useless, or that you might not have appreciated at some other time in your life.
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.
Writing a book about yourself is like therapy, and you go 'Oh My God, that's the reason that happened.' Writing about it, you're forced to really examine things.
When you write a book for publication, you're writing it for other people to read.
The point really is that a writer tends to write a book that he or she tends to write. It's as simple as that. Of course, it's important to make a living and all that, but the main impulse as far as I'm concerned - and I'm sure as other writers are concerned - is to tell a story that I feel impelled by.
Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.
Books give us insight into other people, other cultures. They make us laugh. They make us think. If they are really good, they make us believe that we are better for having read them. You don't read a book - you experience it. Every story opens up a new world.
To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers don't know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.
Often something comes in from which you can see that the person is good, the book may not be perfect as it is, and the person doesn't want to do a re-write. That's something we do almost nothing of.
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