Scott Spencer

It could be said that all armed conflicts are a ludicrous and shameful waste of lives, but World War I has a special place in the history of futility - a war without clear purpose, a war whose resolution would ultimately make the world a far worse place.

As a writer, I try to turn my feelings and experiences into a different form entirely, something that gives me mastery over them and also makes them meaningful to other people.

When I look back at my life and think about what really happened, my memory is obscured by the stories I've created out of those incidents. In stories, as reality melds with art, the result sometimes feels truer than real life.

Writers are stewards of the culture. Publishers, librarians, bookstore owners. We're all in this together. To write books that are gripping, important, that people want to have, is to keep publishing alive.

I surely don't think ignorance is bliss. But like everything else that has survived thousands of years of human evolution, ignorance - like denial, self-delusion, and magical thinking - seems to have its uses.

With writing, you really have to have faith. You have to have some sort of confidence that if you keep at it, you will get where you need to go, because there are so many points where a rational person would quit.

That's sort of the amazing thing about writing something down and then having it printed and published - it's frozen. It's there. It's set. It's in ink. It's done. Nothing changes it.

Like most people, I find my own experiences - and my emotional responses to those experiences - fascinating and mysterious, even those that are a bit shaming and a little repellent.

If a book isn't teaching me something, pulling something out of me, then it will be dull for me and the reader.

By the time I was 14, my most burning ambition was to leave my home, leave my neighborhood, leave my city. I kept it a secret wish. It was easier done than said. It wasn't only that I wanted to leave Chicago - I wanted to live in New York City. And I did - for a time.

It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.

I was raised in a house on the far South Side of Chicago, in a development erected on a landfill made from slag and other industrial by-products a few years after World War II.