Read At The Level At

I Am At My Worst Trying To Write About Things That Overlap With My Life.

The Average Person Might Articulate Them Differently, But We All Think About Interpersonal Relationships In One Way Or Another. Writers Just Express That In Different Ways And Capture It In Different Ways. To Some Degree, We're All Thinking About The Same Things. It's The Zeitgeist. The Trick, In A Way, As A Writer, Is To Hope That Your Interests In Some Sense Link Up With The Culture Around You.

A Swell Of Gratitude And Appreciation For His Assistant, As Opposed To The Murderous Rage He Felt Toward The Rest Of His Staff

When The Clock Stops On A Life, All Things Emanating From It Become Precious, Finite, And Cordoned Off For Preservation. Each Aspect Of The Dead Person Is Removed From The Flux Of The Everyday, Which, Of Course, Is Where We Miss Him Most. The Quarantine Around Death Makes It Feel Unlucky And Wrong--a Freakish Incursion--and The Dead, Thus Quarantined, Come To Seem More Dead Than They Already Are.... Borrowing From The Dead Is A Way Of Keeping Them Engaged In Life's Daily Transactions--in Other Words, Alive.

But I Always Need To Identify With A Character To Write About Him Or Her - And By "identify," I Mean See The World Through That Person's Eyes And Have A Strong Sense Of The Inner Logic Of Their Acts And Decisions, Wacky Or Wrongheaded Though They Might Be. In That Sense, I Think There's Some Of Me In All Of Them.