Broach

Interesting, right? If you want characters to have natural thoughts, just use entries from your diary or your journal. Then they’ll speak in a conversational cadence, without too much work. Of course, this won’t work if you’re very stiff with how you let your thoughts out on paper. Maybe try recording yourself, then transcribing after.

You should write a novel, I told her.

Why would I? she laughed. I’m here to have fun, not hold a therapy session for myself. Don’t you ever feel like writers mostly need to write to help themselves? Without that angle, I wonder why write much at all.

Surely you don’t believe that, I said. The classics, both fiction and non-fiction, only came to be because someone sat down and wrote them.

The classics are already lost. A bird chirped, and we listened to its song til the end before she continued. Have you read a book at all, if you never understood it?