Goodreads asked Michael Dickel:

What’s the best thing about being a writer?

Michael Dickel There's a best thing? I am driven to write. If I don't, I become sullen and withdrawn. Writing is living, for me. So the best thing about being a writer is that I am most alive when I write, alive at all because I write. Writing is often difficult, hard work, and always challenging. I suppose the best thing for me is when a reader tells me something positive about their experience reading my work—then I know that the writing works, it reaches another human being in a way that the other human values. That's spiritual in nature.

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