I intentionally approached each story in 'Killing and Dying' in a different way, and that includes the writing process.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The process of writing a book has given me a whole new reverence for writers. Mechanically, it is a brutal process; emotionally, it's incredibly healing.
All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom.
In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.
Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.
You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.
The process of writing is like creating a game of dominoes: The first domino creates the second incident, and so forth until the end.
I considered that I had to write stories about the people I had met, with whom I'd worked, the history of my books - just in case I up and die.
I write and draw from the gut. I often don't know what my stories are about until they're done.
When I started writing the third book, 'The Kill,' the intention was just to write a thriller, a crime novel for myself, really, in which there would be no body, no solution - where you would look at an event from different people's perspectives.