Well, my background is journalism. I don't have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.
Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year.
Write your goddamned book now. The world awaits.
Three-dimensional results are important to me. I did once spend some time just writing, and floating around, and I lost my mind a little bit. I wasn't so good at that.
I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.
If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.
Loneliness is just a thing that I'm not personally interested in. So far, it hasn't been on my docket of things to write about.
