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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andor" data-source="post: 6357747" data-attributes="member: 1879">Speaking for myself, I find what you are discussing her critical to my really enjoying a book. Good authors will often speak of characters who were meant to play a certain role and at some point in the narrative sat up and decided to do something else. My favorite authors are the ones who let them do this and let the chips fall where they may.I recommended Dianne Wynn Jones above, and when I was exploring her works I found many people raving about how great Fire and hemlock is. So I read it and was ... underwhelmed. On reading the authors own words about the book I realized why. It was a very tightly and deliberately crafted story, plotted out before the characters had identities of their own, and they were not allowed to stray from their tasks. Like actors working to a script and not being given leeway to explore the characters, it fell a bit flat for me. This is not, incidently, a problem I found in Mrs Jones's other works.I haven't read Coleridge, I suppose I should put him on my "to be read" list, but it's a long list. However while reading your quotes earlier in this thread I was reminded of a book called "Proust was a Neuroscientist" which describes how many modern explorations of the brain are often confirming, with more technical jargon, what earlier writers had reported. Coleridges divisions of the creative processes ring very true to what we know about creative processes in modern cognitive theory. Or, to quote another author "Creativity has deeper springs than does conciousness." As I mentioned, it is quite perceptible to the reader when an author does or does not employ the deeper creative process you mention. That's one of the reasons I'm so fond of Lois Bujold as an author, since her approach to writing, while very scholarly and well informed, often consists of handing her characters horrible situations and then sitting back to see what they do, and that sort of organic, emergant process makes for a better book. IMHO. Aided of course by the fact that Lois is keenly aware that the reader is the authors partner in reading the book, rather than a passive observer. (Read "Dreamweavers Dilema" for her essay on this.)</blockquote>

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