I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.
I have a longing for fiction, to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.
I saw that my best work was my most personal work, which is odd, because my fiction is very far afield and has nothing to do with my life.
I'm trying to move a little more toward literary fiction while still retaining a popular feel.
You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.
Oh you know, I've been writing a novel.
For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.
I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.
Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.
I do write a lot from personal experience, but I also embellish a bit.
Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
I don't think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.
Because I really love tax, tax topics actually feature quite a lot in my fiction of various lengths. I once wrote a science fiction short story centered around the idea of an alien tax code, and the idea that you can understand a society by parsing its tax code.
I would like to believe that most people, regardless of gender, are good and kind. The good men in my stories are the rule. It's the bad men that are the exception and because I tend toward the dark in my fiction, you see more of the exception than the rule.
I've only written one science-fiction book: 'Fahrenheit 451.' That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.
It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.
When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'
NOVEL, n. A short story padded.
It's never too late - in fiction or in life - to revise.
Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.
I feel as if I've been so inured to failure, because I fail more than I succeed. As with any kind of fiction, I throw out so many pages; I get rejected so many times.
When I write something, I can't remember in the end if this is a memory or if it's not - I'm talking about fiction. So for me, it's the same thing.
They say that every writer, they write about himself, and I think that to a certain extent that is true. But also we are creators of fiction.
When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.
