how many miles?

[incandescens]

I'm having one of those daydream-interspersed evenings, full of images that make excellent private Mary Sue moments, but are less useful when it comes to constructive writing. I was looking at Diana Wynne Jones' Deep Secret just now to find a quote (the Babylon poem, for the curious) and it reminded me just how much I enjoyed it, but also just how good a writer she is. I found myself rereading Nick's description of the journey to Babylon. It succeeds on so many levels -- as a teenager describing a very difficult physical journey, as a non-initiate trying to describe things he passes which he doesn't recognise but which someone with occult education might be able to infer something about, and as a normal human being touching the abnormal, or the supernormal, or the supernatural.

Writing different characters and different perspectives; I know that the writer has everyone inside her brain. That's what writers do. However, sometimes the characters have more of an impact than expected, because once you've actually understood their point of view, your own conceptual view of things may have changed. Being able to understand doesn't always mean that your understanding changes, but sometimes it does. Yes, this is right/wrong/deserving death/deserving forgiveness/understandable/unforgivable/taboo/perfectly natural. And the writer can hardly complain, because she wanted the extra understanding, didn't she?

Perhaps we just shouldn't allow characters into our minds. The activity may be too dangerous for amateurs.