I'm really in it now. I've become consumed by my story, my characters. They're all clanging around my head, desperate to escape. Details emerge every part of the day, even when not writing. A new twist will occur to me as I clean around the house. A facet dawns as I cook. And when I drive, this world pushes aside all other thoughts, gleefully taking center stage.
It sounds like madness when I describe it. Perhaps it is a kind of madness, one that every author develops as they sink further into the story they write. I'm convinced that in order to make the story and the characters live and breathe on the page as authentically as anything in real life, it must become ALIVE to you. It must possess you. And so allow myself to become possessed, I do.
In the idle times between writing and researching, I look back and realize that I've always been doing this. I've always been creating little stories in my head. I lacked the focus to fully realize them as a younger person, but the potential was always there. When I wasn't writing, I was treating myself as the protagonist in every kind of fantasy a person could think of. So it's a bit odd that I still look at my decision to become a writer with so much surprise; I've been doing this much longer than anything else.
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