The words and ideas contained within their pages are the property of their authors and cannot be used for any purposes without the authors' specific written consent. The Cardinal Trait of a Writer Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. Cyril Connolly We write to find ourselves. In that sense, we're locating where we are in the values of this time and place. It is the crossroads that the sociologist C. Wright Mills referred to as the intersection of biography and history.
Every moment is both an individual, private one and a cultural, public one.
Being too aware of this could more likely lead to paralysis than writing. But writing involves the faith that there are the right words for the moment, words that can transcend the limitations of generational communication and outlive the cultural moment in which they were born. An awareness of craft makes this possible. This applies as well to the craft of characterization, which is the sinew of writing. I am always more successful with a writing project when there is a conscious social theme or a set of subthemes underlying the work.