What do you do when you get your best idea and you're nowhere NEAR a writing implement? Memorise it? The trouble with memorising something perfectly is that you're more liable to forget it perfectly. On Monday I was trying out a bizarre new cross-trainer at the gym (is there anyone in the universe who doesn't look like a demented monkey when they go on a cross-trainer?!) and I relaxed sufficiently for my mind to wander off and have my two main characters converse with each other, a conversation that only occurs at the end of the novel.
It was word-perfect. It was concise, beautiful, exactly the sort of writing I want to do. But it was so perfect that not only did I forget it but I forgot that they had even had this conversation and when I finally remembered to write it down, two days had passed and I couldn't even conjure the core. These perfect conversations seem to go on inside my head when I'm generally quite removed from the world, like the exact two seconds before I go to sleep. Recently I managed to have these thoughts while washing the dishes which meant much pulling off of the rubber gloves, dashing to the lounge and frantically scribbling the words down in the exercise book I have just for such (rare) occasions.
And yet I know when my two main characters finally meet (possibly in the next chapter or the one after.....so quite soon) I'm going to have forgotten all the brilliant things they need to say to each other.
When I was young and wanted to be a painter, I found I couldn't express the images on my head on paper. I thought I would be better at expressing myself in words. But it seems that this is a universal problem with art, no matter it's form: you can create the most utterly beautiful, brilliant, wonderful, expressive, to-die-for creations in your mind but in the so-called real world, it just dies a death. What does this say about the real world?
It was word-perfect. It was concise, beautiful, exactly the sort of writing I want to do. But it was so perfect that not only did I forget it but I forgot that they had even had this conversation and when I finally remembered to write it down, two days had passed and I couldn't even conjure the core. These perfect conversations seem to go on inside my head when I'm generally quite removed from the world, like the exact two seconds before I go to sleep. Recently I managed to have these thoughts while washing the dishes which meant much pulling off of the rubber gloves, dashing to the lounge and frantically scribbling the words down in the exercise book I have just for such (rare) occasions.
And yet I know when my two main characters finally meet (possibly in the next chapter or the one after.....so quite soon) I'm going to have forgotten all the brilliant things they need to say to each other.
When I was young and wanted to be a painter, I found I couldn't express the images on my head on paper. I thought I would be better at expressing myself in words. But it seems that this is a universal problem with art, no matter it's form: you can create the most utterly beautiful, brilliant, wonderful, expressive, to-die-for creations in your mind but in the so-called real world, it just dies a death. What does this say about the real world?
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