I’m in the middle of starting a new novel right now, and the bad thing about that strange phase of existence is that everything you see and hear somehow relates, in the wankmulch your brain has become, to that novel. Even a shopping list becomes a mass of notation and connective lines — because you’re convinced that the six things on it reveal something phenomenal about the world and your place in it, and there’s a place in the novel where you can shove all that in.
Deep down, there’s a little James Joyce homunculus in our hearts, presumably chatting up a saucy-looking ventricle and asking it if it shags, and also spreading the beautifully toxic notion that his book Ulysses actually contains all of Dublin in it and, should it ever be destroyed, a new Dublin could be generated from it like a backup copy, if needs be. And so we peer around at everything, to see if we can image it on a hard drive of a book, ghosting the real world.
Also it’s important to note that when writers — or at least I — get into this condition, we talk very fast and make not a lot of sense.
Warren Ellis, “Ghosting the real world”, Wired (UK), 2010-10-07
October 7, 2010
QotD: The dangers of being a novelist
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