You Need The Art In Order To

Writing Has To Do With Truth-telling. When You're Writing, Let's Say, An Essay For A Magazine, You Try To Tell The Truth At Every Moment. You Do Your Best To Quote People Accurately And Get Everything Right. Writing A Novel Is A Break From That: Freedom. When You're Writing A Novel, You Are In Charge; You Can Beef Things Up.

One's Head Is Finite. You Pour More And More Things Into It - Surnames, Chronologies, Affiliations - And It Packs Them Away In Its Tunnels, And Eventually You Find That You Have A Book About Something That You Publish.

Some After-the-fact Storytelling Is Inevitable, And, In Fact, Very Good And Useful. But Then We Want Always To Be Able To Enrich The Stories, Or Maybe Change The Stories With A Fresh Infusion Of Specificity.

Haven't You Felt A Peculiar Sort Of Worry About The Chair In Your Living Room That No One Sits In?

People Don't Like To Read Text On Computer Screens (and Reading A Lot Of Text On Ipod Screens Gets Very Tiring Very Soon, Just About As Soon As Running Out Of Battery Power).