Intermittent laziness.
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Question
What do you do when you feel creatively blocked or stuck?
Craft & work
Question
What have you come to understand about what it means to be human?
Values & belief
Question
What is the book you have given most as a gift, and why?
Taste & recommendation
Question
What problem are you still trying to solve?
Craft & work
Question
How does a new work begin for you?
Craft & work
Question
What is your favourite side project?
Craft & work
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's The Q&A has retained this Proust-derived prompt from at least 2007 through 2026, and ABC independently put it to the Obamas in 2011.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I just lack the basic fact-finding instinct.
Travis Holland, Interview, Fiction Writers Review, 11 April 2011 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 257 →Too high an expectation of others and myself.
I can go for weeks without opening the mail. I can look at a letter that has just dropped through the letterbox, wonder what it is and then just shred it.
Bonnie Raitt
Singer and guitarist
When I’m self-involved or insensitive to others.
More from Richard Ford
View profile →The only habit you can rely in the Scarlet O'Hara rule: Tomorrow is another day. And you hope you are there for it.
People just were the mysterious sum of their actions.
Touchstone books….I don’t know. So Long, See You Tomorrow; The Moviegoer; A Fan’s Notes; Alice Munro’s stories.
I sometimes I have the inability to see how I can do what I need to do at a high enough level for me to do it.
Then I think to myself, Well, start. Start. Start.
Beyond that, editing an anthology gives me a chance to find a few new readers for my colleagues’ excellent work.
More on identity & self
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John Grisham, Jane Asher, Margaret Atwood, Julian Clary, Kathy Lette, Jacqueline Wilson
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