Alain De Botton said, "I would never want to meet any writer I was interested in. I'd be afraid the encounter would go wrong. I'd be afraid that they would not be as nice as their books and so I would be disappointed. What you get in a book is that person's best moment. Or at least a very good moment."
I would add that if you do happen on a fiction writer, and people do occasionally trip over them in doorways, you should never believe what they have to say about themselves because (and now that I put this down it seems a little obvious) they like to make things up.
I once went to hear a rather well-known Canadian children's writer speak, and when asked how he worked, he replied that he wrote in the dark, standing up. I, who had read his books, was too polite to say maybe he should sit down and turn on a light. Besides, I sympathized. When I am asked such a question, I am befuddled. I do not know. So I begin to babble: I sit down every morning to watch the sunlight through the forest savoring my one perfect piece of melon -- not too sweet not too sour all ideas come from -- melon. In my nervous state, it seems like a much better answer than the truthful: I get up every morning, run with the dog for an hour by the ocean, write until the kids get home from school, unless I sneak out to buy groceries, feeling guilty but lured away from my desk by the thought of fresh Cheez Whiz.
But then some people want to know when and why I started writing, and at this point, beginning to unravel completely, I disassociate and answer in the third person: She began to write quite late in life having worked first as the only woman plange muggler in an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico where she witnessed a worker fall two hundred feet onto a crab salad sandwich that became the inspiration for much of her early work. This, as she mulls it over, was better than the truth: She was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan; her favorite book was Half Magic by Edward Eager; and she spent years nine through eighteen writing steadily, sending manuscripts off and being encouraged by editors, one of whom later became her agent. At eighteen, when she had published nothing despite long, glowing correspondence with almost every publishing house in New York, she quit writing to study dance at the Canadian College of Dance in Toronto and the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in New York City, with the idea that she had better find herself a daytime job.
"And now?" they ask, intrigued, no doubt, by the crab salad sandwich. "Now?" she says, having somehow calmed herself down. Now that her two daughters are in school all day, and for the first time in a long while she is not writing and teaching ballet or writing and tending babies, now she just writes. She doesn't know why she does it. She doesn't know how she does it. But when she does it she is seated. And the lights are on.
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