If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.
Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.
The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.
One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.
One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that's lacking in our regular lives.
One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.
I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books.
I suppose it's possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can't see how, because writing is such a meticulous, intricate, technical business. I wish I could say that I love my characters and that frequently they take over the book and run away with the plot and so on. But they don't exist.
There's more fiction in my life than in books, so I don't bother with them.
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