When you're rereading or editing your book and you start to expect that this work is going to be reviewed, and you can sort of tell which line is going to show up in reviews.
The whole process of having to put the thing into the world seems so antithetical to the act of writing. Poetry is slightly easier, because there's less money and fewer people involved. You just let a book of poems trickle out in the world, and it finds its own people. Novels are much harder, and you don't think you should have to do some of the things you're made to do.
You become a writer because you like to be alone in a room with your books.
I'm always reading books, I'm always having encounters, I'm always taking trips. Whatever it is you come up with about how you got started, that's equally true for all the books you didn't start.
The reason that the book exists is because there was a gap in you. You wrote the book to fulfill that gap in some way.
Publishing a book is a great thing, and I'm grateful, but it's also a horrible, exposing thing. Once you've published a book, you never write quite as freely again. You're aware, from that point onward, of the kinds of things critics might say about it. You're aware of the kinds of things your publishers might like and dislike about it. You're half-aware of marketing strategies - of all the stuff around the book. Whereas with your very first piece of fiction, if you're lucky, those things barely occur to you at all.
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