Before I published my first book, I worked for a while as a documentary and wedding/bar mitzvah videographer, and a part of me still mourns the lost filmmaker I'll never be. Working on a documentary is nearly the opposite artistic process to writing: as a writer you are always trying to fill out a world to fit your story, but as a documentarian your work is to carve a story out of the world. Sometimes, when I'm feeling particularly blocked at my computer, I miss the days when I could just point my camera at something interesting and wait to see what happens.
I think that I write much more naturally about characters in solitude than characters interacting with others. My natural inclination - and one that I've learned to push against - is to give primacy to a character's interior world. Over the three books that I've written, I've had to teach myself that not every feeling needs to be described and that often the most impactful writing more elegantly evokes those unnamed feelings through the way characters speak and behave.
I don't write because I think I have anything particularly interesting to say. I write because I love writing more than any other work I've done. I do think about entertaining the reader to the extent that I try always to write a book that I myself would want to read, but I don't think it's up for me to decide if what I've written is interesting to others. That is entirely up to others.
