Having been ill for a number of weeks - the dreaded flu, bad cough, aching bones - I have read little, written less and slept more than ever. I did read a wonderful novel, though: David Vann's Legend of a Suicide. I have little I want to say about it now: and I have reviewed it on my other blog: but wanted to say it's a novel that has gotten me thinking. If you love good fiction, then please do read this wonderfully moving piece. I'll stop by when I've processed my thoughts.
Music & The Creative Act
So yesterday I continued working on the most difficult pages of my new novel, Grass and Ember, a particularly harrowing four chapter arc that ends one characters story and propels the reader into the final third of the novel. I've been working slowly on these pages, as it seems each word needs to be precise, more precise than I usually go for. I like my prose to have looseness, almost like a conversation, but this needed the exactness of poetry, it needed to sing. Now when I write I mostly do it in silence. I loathe distraction when I'm writing because I like to lose myself in the work. I see sentences rising up, a symphony of words, and a distraction can cause all those words to come tumbling down, and my reconstruction of them never feels as solid as the first elusive thought I saw. However, launching into this four chapter arc I found my resistance was up, I simply did not want to go there and write them, to think what my character would have to think for this sequence ...
synchronicity... 'stumbled' here from Nathan Bransford's blog, and what book did I start reading a couple of hours ago? Legend of a Suicide.
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