Engaging with creativity in a serious way is a shamanistic activity, and by extension when you choose to follow a mystical path you cannot have a "normal" life within the community. Your job is to stand outside the community and hold up the mirror.

Not every story lends itself tonally to humor, so you have to navigate that territory properly. You can put a humorous spin on anything, really, if you know what you're doing, but it's not always desirable to have your reader laughing on every page.

Energy seems to be the more critical of those two variables, because if I'm really feeling the push/pull to write, then I'll make the time.

Engaging with creativity in a serious way is a shamanistic activity, and by extension when you choose to follow a mystical path you cannot have a "normal" life within the community. Your job is to stand outside the community and hold up the mirror.

Most writers are lazy intellectuals, and it's a goddamn shame because a writer with an audience has a moral responsibility to make readers think about the world in a different way than what they're used to. Why else would you pick up a book if not to inhabit another realm of existence for a while?

In fact, I always assumed that most everything I read was true, to one degree or another. I couldn't articulate this fact until after I read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and he discussed Happening Truth, Story Truth, and Emotional Truth. I always understood that the facts of The Sun Also Rises or On the Road were the facts as dictated by a certain narrative structure, but because the experiences of those characters echoed my own feelings about the world. I knew there was a Happening Truth behind them.

I read a lot; I tried to understand the mechanisms that made the books I liked successful, and I went that route. So, as for readers - when I think about them I like to think they read the same books I do.