Diana Spechler

I have little identity outside of my work. When I’m not immersed in my writing, I feel frantic and distracted, guilty and aimless. I suppose, in this way, writing, at least when it’s going well, is itself medication — an evasion of bad feelings, a retreat from reality. When I’m in the “writer’s trance,” nothing bothers me because the world looks like a pretend world. I can pet a dog, but it’s not a real dog. I can walk over a bridge, but it’s not really a bridge. The Radiohead song “Fake Plastic Trees,” though it’s supposed to be about the artificiality of modern life, captures the writer’s trance — “Her green plastic watering can for her fake Chinese rubber plant in the fake plastic earth that she bought from a rubber man…”

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Another great article by Diane Spechler here.
and another in the in the Paris Review.