I’m wondering why anyone would start to write when the book that lives inside your head before you start writing feels so perfect?  At the stage before you write your characters are vivid and witty and they transition from one emotional moment to the next without awkward pause or stumble.  You can see the whole book in your mind, all the unique insights (oh, don’t you love them!), layered perfectly (you think) on top of characters who fascinate you (and so must be fascinating, right?)  The book inside your head glitters and is exciting, as if you’ve already sold the movie rights and it’s Oscar night.  Ah, the blessing of the imagination, the superiority of whatever cranial spot creates without the interference of the linear lobe, the banker/accountant’s quadrant insisting that one explain exactly how a character got from here to there.  The book inside your head consists of only the great parts, the luscious scenes, the rich emotion all laid out in perfect order.  The best time writing, to me, is not writing, but wandering around with a book inside my head, the characters (who are real friends at this point) having arguments and becoming flushed with joy.  I’m in the grocery store and they’re pacing in front of a fire grappling with tragedy.  I’m stuck in traffic and they’re railing against the Inquisition.  I need them there, unbound by practicalities and delayed gratification.

I’m not sure what pushes me over the edge to commit the book to paper.  Is it really the desire to tell the story to others?  Are writers that gregarious and generous?  Why would we be willing to subject all that glorious mental swirl to the cold logic of plot development?  To mar its perfection with transitions and narrative explanations and the tedium of explaining lineage and how two characters came to be eating in the same inn on a particular night.  A writer willingly takes one of the most precious things in their life and breaks it apart, pulls it down from ether to be pounded into ink, knowing full well that it will suffer in the translation, that there is no chance that the book created on the physical plane will be as glorious as the one created in their head.  Like trying to sketch or even photograph fire, there is no way to do it justice.  Once you start writing, it never glitters like that again.

I suppose writers reach a point where the swirl becomes repetitious, that without writing down the scene and thereby destroying it, one cannot invent another one.  (Are minds limited, like vessels? I’m not sure.  And does this make it the ‘gluttony theory’ of writing, that one wants more, more, and will suffer to always have more?) I suppose at some point you stop grieving over the arrival of the accountant in your own mind and pouting that he has forced you to admit that your character’s journey takes four days on horseback and that means four nights that must be explained.  When you stop pouting I suppose one sees (begrudgingly!) that having something to say about the world, a theme, a social commentary, a unique idea, requires that the creator and the accountant work together, that the swirl of the imagination and the linear march of the plot-monger have to come together.  Some might call it a dance that is difficult for both sides.  In my head, at least, there is ferocious resistance from all corners.