Maria Semple

And he said to me, novels are just your personality and your interests.

And you have a good personality and you have a lot of interests and I would read your novel.

And that's really all it took for me was kind of getting permission from a relative stranger to even try being a novelist.

And

So I just set out.

I bought a book on a stranger who had done it, who had done it.

Yes, who had done it.

And it just gave me that encouragement.

And so I bought a book on fiction writing and kind of learned how to do that.

And I just really was concerned that I would be a bad writer, you know, and that I didn't know that I could be a good writer.

And so I just kind of did sentence by sentence.

And in my first novel, this one is mine.

There are no similes or metaphors.

because I didn't trust myself not to just write bad similes and metaphors.

And so, but now Go Gentle is my fourth book, and I'm a little more confident about similes and metaphors.

Yes.

That's right.

That you've got something.

And it was really like my voice, I think, that I learned to kind of trust my voice.

And I think that's really what my career has been, is just kind of leaning in deeper and deeper to my voice and just trusting that if I like it, they'll like it.