I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.
It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.
I think we need to develop the courage to write from the viewpoint of people who may seem quite different from ourselves, who might have a different sexual orientation or a different race or a different ethnicity.
I think the difference between writing as someone and writing for them is that when you write for someone, you take on a kind of political burden or message, which I don't think we have the right to do.
I don't think a white person can write accurately and convincingly about what black people experience of oppression.
Anyone with an imagination can write about the day-to-day experiences of someone he or she is not.
Sometimes I write well when I'm very upset.
When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.
It's hard to say which of us is luckier, the ones who go through long periods when they can't write or the ones who can write pretty easily.
I don't have the courage not to write all the time.
We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't necessarily just writing saleable novels or getting huge advances.
Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long time how to do it.
I think you have to remember that writing is hard; my first editor used to say that to me.
There are so many different ways, most of them helpful and legal, to get yourself into a state of mind where writing is possible. It's going to be different for each person.
I just like doing it, I like writing.
You may be somebody who writes best for a small press that doesn't pay very well, but you might have a fascinating and intricate style that might not appeal to as many readers but will be incredibly meaningful to the readers you have. Truly, that's as wonderful if not more wonderful.
We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.
I remember I had had one woman who had three or four kids, and some of them were having problems. I said, 'Maybe you could go write somewhere else, away from your house.' And sure enough, all kinds of wonderful stuff emerged. She was keeping too much charge of herself because she couldn't stop being a mother when she was in the house. You have to find your own way of letting loose, if you're one of those people.
Sometimes it's interesting to see what people who have too much control need to do to write freely.
Sometimes people want to know how to write a story from the point of view of a murderer and make her sympathetic. I think the answer is that you start by having her look for her car keys, because everybody knows what it's like.
I had never written about what it's like to live the life of a writer, and I had never read a book that combined talking about the life of writing and how you can do it, how you can stand it, how you can emotionally manage it, with the choices that we all make on the page.
I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.
I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.
There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.
You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.
