Book after book, I get hooked, every time the writer talks to me like a friend.
I figure I'm just one of many people. I'm not that different from anybody else, and I don't have great language, highfalutin' language - I'm very ordinary. So I figure if I write about myself, other people with similar feelings and experiences would go, 'Oh, that's me.'
I try and relate my writing to something I know about, and I had a primary experience of being in a competitive, military environment and being part of a squadron.
I have learned that my assignment is to write books for people who do not like to read books. I really try to connect with people who are not given to spending a lot of time with an open book. Pay day to me is when somebody comes up to me and says, "I never read books but I read yours." I have a heart for that person.
I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it's poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.
I'm still getting used to the idea that people out in the world are reading my books. Every time I get a 'fan letter,' I am thrilled. But when people tell me that they're from the south or western Kentucky, and they say, 'I know exactly what you mean!' That's awesome.
The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.
Everything I write is mostly relatable to everyone and since everyone cannot write, they feel like Sudha Murthy is writing their story. I am your writer next-door.
I've seen a range of children's personalities, so it's easier to write about them without patronising them, I think.
Anything by Lorrie Moore speaks to a certain kind of person.
