I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express that.
For me, life is writing and I can do it anywhere. It doesn't matter where I am. I listen. I write. I live.
I stopped writing at the age of 18. I had written incessantly before that. I read, of course, because I was in university, but I wasn't going to write. I wasn't going to do any of those dangerous things. I was going to be a stolid, bourgeois lawyer.
The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.
The act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing's fun. You're getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not.
But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it.
When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.
Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world.
