I write mostly because I can't stop. It's the hinge of my life, and I don't know who I would be without it. It's my identity. I love the potential of it, the possibilities of it. You choose your palette, your subject, your canvas. You can write about anything in the world, or our of it. Fiction is limited only by your own imagination, your abilities. And this is precisely what I hate about it, too. It scares the shit out of me. Any success I've been able to find--and perforce, any failure--is entirely my own.
Also, there's this: you're never entirely sure where it comes from, so you're never sure that it's going to keep coming. Or what to do if it stops. I hate the uncertainty of it--not knowing when I sit down to write if it's going to be any good or not.
It's too bad that the effort you put into it--the daily grind, the research, the struggling, the interior sweat and shake of it--is, if you're doing it right, mostly invisible within the published work. Writers should be the unseen mechanics. As soon as a writer says, "Look at me. Look at how hard this is," the reader is knocked out of the dream, which is the Original Sin of all fiction. This is a particular risk in historical fiction, where there's always the temptation to stuff in a lot of interesting and irrelevant historical detail. With Last Year's Review, I ended up using a very, very small percentage of my research.
To steal John Barth's excellent metaphor, we should all be the secret operators of our funhouses. "Though [we] would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed." And so no one--family, friends, people you see every day--ever realizes how hard it is. Which is maybe why we do interviews, so we can holler it out loud: "Man, this ain't easy!"
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