But it seemed to be a natural progression. My concepts before were short story concepts, but now they seem not to fit as well into the short story form. So I hope they fit into a novel. Regardless of the level of success he achieves as a writer, Watson plans to continue teaching. Although it's difficult to quantify, he is a firm believer in the symbiotic relationship between writing and the teaching of it.
Writing is such a private act.
But you can go into class and open up and talk to the students about your habits and encourage them to develop good writing habits, and you also can talk to them about attitudes. Not just about enduring all the years of rejection, but about developing healthy attitudes toward the work ethic of writing. It has to be something you do every day in your life, a part of your life, and not something you treat as an occasional activity. Talking to students about that sort of thing and looking at their work helps me to keep a workaday attitude myself. I feel good, now that this book is out, about being able to go into class and encourage those writers and tell them that everything they're going through is normal and that all their doubts are normal.