Novel writing

For me, one of the great pleasures of writing is that it allows me to spend time with people I sort of understand.

Granted, they're imaginary people that I made up out of my own head, but they do things for reasons that make some kind of sense to me.
This is not true on a visceral level for me in regards most people and most social interactions.
One thing I have discovered as I write more regularly is that the emotional experience is at once soothing and nauseating, because what it forces me to be aware of (in translating from the venue of options that make sense to me to the venue of options that might hopefully make sense to a reader) is how very much we have (as people not writers) isolated maps of human motivation.

And how little most people consider this astonishes me.  Psychologically a vast number of people spend a vast amount of time resting in an analytical mode where they allow themselves to pretend that other people do things and react to things in ways that would make sense to the observer.

Sometimes someone takes on a role that allows them to look down both sides of one of these divides for a few moments, and the view is dizzying.