Writing Moment

This morning, I had a remarkable dream, and I was inspired, not to write it down, but to use a clue given in the dream to write a scene that I had been struggling with in my novel. I try to aim for regular scenes that genuinely have an emotional impact on the reader, and so I try to find things that have a genuine impact on me as a writer. I think that reading a book should be an experience that offers more than just a "that was cool" reaction: it should strike the reader on a deep emotional level and offer him the opportunity to change his way of seeing the world, as though he himself had experienced the events of the book. In that way, I think reading a book can be as moving as real life. But I've heard this before, and it's true: if the writer doesn't feel anything while writing it, the reader doesn't feel anything when reading it.

And so I made the change to the scene in my head, and it felt right, so I got up, turned my computer on, and wrote it. And as I was typing the final words, I was overcome with emotion, I sobbed aloud, and tears ran down my face. It was the first time I had driven myself to the point of tears in a story.

I don't know if I'll even use the scene in the final draft of the novel, since it's still a while before I connect where the novel is now to that point, so things might be different by then. I do have the feeling that it will still be there in some way; I was genuinely heartbroken by characters that exist only in my imagination.

And that was remarkable.