I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.
I could say that all my books were conceived by the time I was twenty, although they were not to be written for another thirty or forty years. But perhaps this is true of most writers—the emotional storage is done very early on.
If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen.
I definitely have been very mindful of what kind of leader and creator I want to be. A lot of that has to with looking at the writers that you work with. They're all like your children. They all need love, but different versions of it.
Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things.
I'm more concerned with getting them to find and strengthen their original voice as writers rather than imposing my own subjective tastes, judgements or sensibility on the project.
I think that, in principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea - an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve.
In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75.
