"In the middle of the novel, a kind of magical thinking takes over. To clarify, the middle of the novel may not happen in the actual geographical center of the novel. By middle of the novel I mean whatever page you are on when you stop being a part of the household and your family and your partner and children and food shopping and dog feeding and reading the post---I mean when there is nothing in the world except your book, and even as your wife tells you she's sleeping with your brother her face is a gigantic semicolon, her arms are parenthesis and you are wondering whether rummage is a better verb than rifle.
The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses. You sit down to write at 9 a.m., you blink, the evening news is on and four thousand words are written, more words than you wrote in three long months, a year ago. Something has changed. And it's not restricted to the house. If you go outside, everything---I mean, everything---flows freely into your novel. Someone on the bus says something--it's straight out of your novel. You open the paper--every single story in the paper is directly relevant to your novel. If you are fortunate enough to have someone wanting to publish your novel, this is the point at which you phone them in a panic and try to get your publication date brought forward because you cannot believe how in tune the world is with your unfinished novel right now, and if it isn't published next Tuesday maybe the moment will pass and you will have to kill yourself.
Magical thinking makes you crazy--and renders everything possible. Incredibly knotty problems of structure now resolve themselves with inspired ease. You randomly pick a poetry book off the shelf and the first line you read ends up being your epigraph--it seems to have been written for no other reason."
From "That Crafty Feeling" in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith
I highly recommended this book for writers and I'll probably post more soon and I am in the MIDDLE!!!
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