Feeding the flames

I found this wonderful piece by Phillip Pullman via Scott Rosenberg’s Salon blog. Pullman talks about how you need both imagination and reason in writing. But he cannot will himself to write something his imagination isn’t engaged in:

When I try, it's like trying to light a fire with damp wood. Nothing catches. Making the will do the work of the imagination is a wearisome and melancholy task, and it would drive you mad with despair in no time if you let it. And there's no need to, after all; when there is dry tinder nearby, and when the spark of your imagination leaps toward it like a lover, you can have a fine blaze roaring in a moment, if a blaze is what you want…

 

If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your imagination is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics or adultery among the artists or the perils threatening the environment, but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons, then feed the flames, feed the flames.

10:05:41 AM      trackback []