"My characters write my stories for me. They tell me what they want, then I tell them to go get it, and I follow as they run, working at my typing as they rush to their destiny. Montag, in 'F. 451' wanted to stop burning books. Go stop it! I said. He ran to do just that. I followed, typing. Ahab, in 'Moby Dick,' wanted to chase and kill a whale. He rushed off raving off to do so. Melville followed, writing the novel with a harpoon on the flesh of the damned Whale!" (Busch, Frederick. (1999). Letters to a Fiction Writer. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company)
Makes it sound easy, hunh?
1 comment:
I love Ray Bradbury...my favorite line ever from his book Zen and the Art of Writing---
"Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears those words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in the writer's make up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto."
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