Goodreads asked Collin Piprell:

What’s the best thing about being a writer?

Collin Piprell As a writer I get to engage with activities and ideas that interest me and, sometimes, synthesize these in the course of spinning stories. Whatever I learn, and however I learn it, tends in some often pre-articulate way to shape my overall fiction project—both the books I’m writing and those I’m hoping to write in future.

Another pleasure: as I draft and revise fiction I learn more and more about the craft of writing and the art of making prose as readable as I can.

Being a writer can also enrich the experience of reading. Not that I tend to read fiction very analytically, but I can’t help but appreciate good writing on levels I might not see if I hadn’t faced similar challenges in my own writing.

But the real payoff as a writer, at least for me, comes after I’ve been banging my head against some story for days, frustrated with my wooden prose and dumb ideas. Then one morning I go straight to my computer of clipboard and start churning stuff I must’ve been struggling with all night long, on some unconscious level. It can be magical; I have no idea where some of it comes from. This may be the experience that, all those thousands of years ago, inspired the legend of the Muse.

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