I had a little ego boost surfing the Web last night. One of 39 ain't too shabby. A number of deadlines are looming, and I've been putting off just about everything I should be doing because I'd rather be writing. But now I've really got to devote a little time to real life again, sob. I often get my ideas not from characters, but from the ideas of what my characters will be involved in.
Ideas come from other places.
I don't believe that, in my society, novels effect serious changes in anyone other than the handful of people who are writers, whose own novels are of course seriously affected by other novelist's novels. I can't see anything like that happening to the ordinary reader, nor would I expect it to. Novels provide readers with something to read. That seems to me the only realistic expectation. It also seems to me quite enough.