The point of my explanation is I'm very subjective when it comes to describing my characters: they are all a little bit a part of me from the outside in or the inside out - but to put your mind at ease, I built Paul Snider from the outside in.
Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.
The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.
It occurred to me that nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting, so I devised a method of cleaning off the page opposite the editorial, which became the most important in America and thereon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts.
History -- its what those bitter old men write.
You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.
Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.
Should you create a protagonist based directly on yourself? The problem with this - and it is a very large problem - is that almost no one can view himself objectively on the page. As the writer, you're too close to your own complicated makeup.
Whenever I write, I only write about what I know or what I have experienced or feeling.
A written discourse on any subject is bound to contain much that is fanciful.
I've never written for anybody else. For me, it was a challenge. I write for me. I don't write for anybody else. And what was good about it was that I was writing for somebody I knew. I knew what my mother thinks and how she feels. So it was finding that creative spirit to write about my mother.
I started being me about the songs, not writing objectively, but subjectively. I think it was Dylan who helped me realize that - not by any discussion or anything, but by hearing his work.
There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.
There's nothing mathematical to my writing. It's a feeling.
There are two kinds of authors - subjective and objective. Introverts are more inward looking.
My first feeling was that there was no way to continue. Writing isn't like math;in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything.
When writing sex scenes, there is often no pleasing anyone, except perhaps the writer herself.
I can't remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you're writing.
I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
I write about what I know and what I have experienced. This keeps me an "honest" writer.
I admire writers who can remain objective and distanced, but that doesn't seem to be in my toolbox somehow. I have to care, I have to have skin in the game.
Sometimes, in a fictional story, you can be more honest and truthful, actually. As a journalist, you're a prisoner of the data, in effect. You have to tell the story with evidence you can verify.
You can read my stuff; there are not very many quotes. It's more impressionistic.
I find it hard to write in the first person.
I am not an autobiographical writer.
