A while ago I wrote a couple of pages of New Novel, and even before I printed them out to get a second opinion from my first editor (who is married to me, but who doesn't let that fact interfere with the sometimes brutal honesty) I knew that they were not good enough. They were dense -- four scenes of story stuffed into six paragraphs, a synopsis of what I needed to write. My instinct was spot-on and my first editor told me the exact same thing.

But the opposite of knowing that something is inadequate is knowing that it is good. And every now and then something is good enough to be nothing less than a gift from the Gods.

Often it's my characters who will come up with these things, stuff I SWEAR I have never thought, or said, or intended to put into a book, until I see myself typing it and it appears on the computer screen as though by magic. See whole essay here -- http://storytellersunplugged.com/almaalexander/2009/10/30/little-miracles/