Writerly thoughts....
I love reading author interviews, because, invariably, something they say will resonate. In this case, I was reading an interview of a new writer, Mazarkis Williams, on Fantasy-Faction.com (a terrific website, by the way) . I haven't read his book (he's a first-time author with one book out, called The Emperor's Knife, which is now on its way to me via my library) but this quote caught my eye:
"All day long-if I am not reading, or physically writing-I am mentally writing. Whether I am driving, making toast, or trying to go to sleep at night, there’s some kind of story winding its way along my neurons. Writing them down is harder than I always think. It’s just right there in my brain, right? Wrong. It’s teeth-grindingly awful to get those words up on the page. But at least I know what the story is before I start."
Does that happen to any of you? I have to say that this *exactly* describes my brain. No matter what I'm doing, either in the foreground or the background of my mind, characters are walking along doing, saying, jumping, sleeping, eating, fighting, falling in love, sh**ing themselves from fear, or laying bleeding and dazed... and I think, "Oh, I need to write that! It's so vivid it'll be dead easy!"
And then I sit down and, um. Yeah. Not so easy. Completely freakin' hard, most of the time. So it's nice to hear another writer bemoaning that he has the same trouble.
"All day long-if I am not reading, or physically writing-I am mentally writing. Whether I am driving, making toast, or trying to go to sleep at night, there’s some kind of story winding its way along my neurons. Writing them down is harder than I always think. It’s just right there in my brain, right? Wrong. It’s teeth-grindingly awful to get those words up on the page. But at least I know what the story is before I start."
Does that happen to any of you? I have to say that this *exactly* describes my brain. No matter what I'm doing, either in the foreground or the background of my mind, characters are walking along doing, saying, jumping, sleeping, eating, fighting, falling in love, sh**ing themselves from fear, or laying bleeding and dazed... and I think, "Oh, I need to write that! It's so vivid it'll be dead easy!"
And then I sit down and, um. Yeah. Not so easy. Completely freakin' hard, most of the time. So it's nice to hear another writer bemoaning that he has the same trouble.