14 April 1997
A scene moved today. This is worth recording because movement has been rare and because I had begun to distrust the entire apparatus: desk, lamp, notebook, patience, verb.
The error was mine. I had been forcing the central character to make the ugliest choice because central characters are greedy and I have allowed mine too much theatre. The scene improved the instant I gave the ugliness to Grace, who had been standing beside the plot like a coatstand with opinions.
Now Grace lies. Not nobly. Not to protect anyone. She lies because the truth would make her ordinary, and she would rather be damned than ordinary. That is a motive I can believe in. It opens the room. It gives the next page somewhere to go.
This is what advice misses when it is busy being useful. Writing is not only endurance, not only a brave trudge through rejection. Sometimes it is a small mechanical click, a pressure changing under the fingers, and suddenly the machine that hated you yesterday becomes willing.
No one has bought anything. No editor has rung. The world remains largely uninterested. Still, for forty minutes this afternoon, the work was alive and I liked it without negotiation.