Never Say Love Is "like" Anything... It

I Might Spend 100 Pages Trying To Get To Know The World I'm Writing About: Its Contours, Who Are My Main Characters, What Are Their Relationships To Each Other, And Just Trying To Get A Sense Of What And Who This Book Is About. Usually Around That Point Of 100 Pages, I Start To Feel Like I'm Lost, I Have Too Much Material, It's Time To Start Making Some Choices. It's Typically At That Point That I Sit Down And Try To Make A Formal Outline And Winnow Out What's Not Working And What I'm Most Interested In, Where The Story Seems To Be Going.

He Comes To This Other World And He Has To Reinvent Himself. Again, It Felt Natural, Even Though I'd Been Working Really Hard Trying To Come Up With Something.

For Me, The Goal Is Always To Write A Novel That I Myself Would Like To Read. People Frequently Ask Me What My Favorite Book Is, And In Effect, There's Always A Capital-f Favorite, Capital-b Book That I Would Like To Write Myself Someday. I Try To Go For That Ideal Of Writing The Best, Most Entertaining, Most Beautifully Written Book That I Possibly Can.

I Was Surprised That My Wife Thought It Was A Good Idea, Then Again With My Agent, Another Woman, Then My Editor, Another Woman - In Spite Of The Fact That All Three Of Them Reacted Positively I Still Have This Fear.

. . .i Really Ought To Have Recognized It For What It Was And, Perhaps, To Have Stopped Right There - For It Was Nostalgia, And What Inspires Nostalgia Has Been Dead A Long Time