I had time to snuggle up with a book this morning. It feels like the ultimate privilege, letting words transport you somewhere across space and time, yet all within the confines of the lovely duvet.
If ever I get good enough to write words in a book, I hope I can do the same thing for other people. Imagine creating a world out of your head and then inviting other people to join you in it, to escape with you sentence by sentence, story by story.
Or imagine just inventing a character - someone so well-rounded that they might as well be a real person! I’d love to do that. I’d love to come up with a terrible villain, put him or her in a room with a pugnacious protagonist, and just see what happens. And then my hero! What fatal flaws would they carry? And what situation would bring them face to face with their own weakness so that they have to make a terrible choice?
It’s hard work all that. Then, getting a story published is three times harder still, apparently. I know someone currently querying for an agent - she’s written an entire novel - and I see the fault-lines of depression creeping into her posts and tweets.
I snapped my book shut. Grey skies out there, along with that wintry fog that gathers around the trees. That is the thing about escaping into a book, I suppose: sooner or later the real world spins back into focus.
No comments:
Post a Comment