"I also believe that writing becomes worthwhile and vitalized only through a full and exciting life"

Writing draws its energy from the pulse of lived experience. The more a person risks, observes, loves, fails, and wonders, the more oxygen their sentences carry. Vitality on the page is not a mere matter of vocabulary or technique; it is the echo of days that had texture, crowded subways and quiet midnights, arguments that sting, kindnesses that reroute a life, landscapes that shift one’s sense of scale. When a life is full, the writer’s metaphors come not from a toolbox but from a bloodstream, and the words feel warm because they have been tempered by weather, touch, and time.

A “full and exciting life” is not simply frenetic busyness or perpetual travel. It is radical attention and honest engagement: saying yes to curiosity, letting the world contradict you, learning a craft and then letting experience interrupt it. Excitement is the spark of encountering what is larger than one’s preconceptions, strangeness, complexity, consequences. Writing becomes worthwhile when it bears witness to that collision between self and world, when it refuses to be insulated from the stakes of living.

Imagination still matters, but imagination is a muscle nourished by encounters. Characters feel alive when they borrow breath from real voices overheard, real grief endured, real awe felt while staring at a thunderhead. Structure and discipline shape the work, yet without the press of authentic experience the shapes remain hollow, clever containers without a pulse. A sentence can be flawless and still inert if it never touched the raw edge of reality.

To make work that is vital, one must court aliveness: show up where discomfort teaches, practice empathy where convenience would suffice, cultivate play, and accept risk. The page then becomes more than a mirror; it becomes a conduit through which the world passes, changed and charged. The life fuels the language, and the language returns the favor by making the life more awake.