David Mitchell - reconfirmed hero

I saw David Mitchell at Cody's tonight. The man is brilliant. He read from Black Swan Green.
http://www.codysbooks.com/product/info.jsp?isbn=1400063795
It was completely captivating: the story, the language, his reading. He really gets into it, does all the voices, the sounds. And he obviously loves questions. He really thought about the answers, wanted to get them right.

He got a question about genre, since he has elements of Sci Fi and and Gothic etc in his literary fiction. He said that genres were like sections in an orchestra, usually someone masters the section and stays there. The instruments in that section are usually not used by those outside of the section. Genres can be used as tools for a writer. And they can be the way into writing as they are often the way into reading. (He thanked Dan Brown for bringing so many people to reading.) That's my understanding of his idea. He said it much more eloquently, of course.

He also talked about originality coming from cliche. Go for the cliche, the common understanding, and twist it.

So I'm pumped because his writing, and his thinking about writing, and his passion for writing and for ideas, are everything I love about both reading and writing. But also, once again, I'm feeling like my writing will never be as good as I think good is, since little is good next to David Mitchell. I'll keep working at it anyway. He also said, when I saw him two years ago, that when he realised that if he wanted to ever write he'd better get started, he was twenty-five and he wrote a bunch of 'crap' for years. (Couldn't have been too many years though. I think he was born in 69 and is now working on his fifth novel.) So, I'm just going to go ahead and continue to write my crap and see where it takes me. Though, I've got to get some reading done too. I'm going to reread Cloud Atlas, then onto Black Swan Green.