Jon Frankel

Certainly you cannot teach people to write novels with their body parts. A novel is a complex entity that requires experience of life, hard work at craft and discipline. But I don’t think there is a rational explanation for why I sit in a chair for an hour or two a night after work, after making dinner, after washing dishes, in a state of emotional and physical exhaustion exercising not only my intellect but my imagination and empathetic self for nothing other than the satisfaction of having done so, and the weird belief that I will get better at this if I keep working at it. I would not do that for an idea that doesn’t inspire me, a story that doesn’t haunt me constantly, that has pieces I never knew about that fall into place out of nowhere. They may require rearrangement or polish, but the pieces are not always of my conscious invention.
-Jon Frankel, Last Bender