January 12, 2008

The momentum of writing takes over even as I take a breather after having finished Lake on the Mountain. Of course it's not as simple as just walking away from the keyboard. My brain refuses to give up the job. Snippets of writing float through my head at unexpected moments, commanding my attention and making me stop and scribble whatever comes to mind. It's as though once I've done with pushing it through, the other stuff starts to float through more freely and things I hadn't thought about start to emerge. This is the time when I'm allowed to overhear conversations between the characters that will never take place in the book. (They never speak to me directly -- I'm not even in their world.) Maybe it's their way of letting me get to know them better, I suppose, so that I could tell you the type of toothpaste they prefer (if they have a preference, unlike me) or even the brand of condom that works best for them. A friend of my asked recently if I was able to click in and out of 'writing mode' quickly and thoroughly. I said yes, but perhaps the answer is that I'm never truly out of it.