I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for. ↗
Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent. ↗
The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work. ↗
To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone. ↗
You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it. ↗