How Fiction Works....

Just read How Fiction Works by James Wood (Random House 2008) which is a bit literary for a popular crime writer like myself but the final paragraph leaves all writers with something to ponder; ....the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable ageing. The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.