You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world.
Stories are the rich, unseen underlayer of the most ordinary moments.
When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.
I don't think that my films are 'literary'; they are based on the most ordinary things of life.
I mostly associated video game storytelling with unforgivable clumsiness, irredeemable incompetence - and suddenly, I was finding the aesthetic and formal concerns I'd always associated with fiction: storytelling, form, the medium, character. That kind of shocked me.
In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.
There's always an anxiety about playing literary characters because one of the great joys of reading books is that you can create your own vision of things.
Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.
Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.
I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.
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