It is not a wound I can heal……Child, listen. That power resides in you alone. Nothing can be changed without undoing what was done. Yet even a stunted tree reaches toward the sunlight. Let the wound heal. Bear the scar with pride…. You will find a way.
Stories wait for endings, but songs are brave things bold enough to sing when all they know is darkness.
All most of us want is for our boat to be lifted off dry ground to someplace new, someplace better. All most of us really want is to be loved, to be validated, to be held, to be heard. Maybe our costumes are different, maybe our interests are different, maybe our tortures were different. But the human condition is always the same. We want recognition. We want to be able to be who we are. We want to be real. An occasional hug shouldn’t be such a radical concept.
I knew you’d kiss me.”
“How?” I say. Because I didn’t know myself.
“Because I’m in pain,” he says. “That’s the only way I get your attention.
How do you think of the characters in your books?
They come partly from life. A friend recently said that all the adult characters in my books struck her as completely mad, and I suppose this is because most of the adults I knew as a youngster behaved as if they were precisely that. Though I have never yet found a niche in a book for either Professor Tolkien or the visionary gardener, I have not despaired of finding one for both in the end.
Those that I do draw from life, I use sparingly, one per book usually, to ensure that the other people, who come from my head, will behave as real people would.
The majority are, you might say, made up, and these are of two kinds: those I have known for a long time and who have been kicking their heels in the corridors of my brain, waiting for the right narrative to go into, and the ones who suddenly present themselves, as entire people, because of the logic of the book.
It is, I find, essential to know real and made-up both as well as you would know your own siblings. One reason for knowing them that well is that you then need not describe them in any detail: if you know them that well, they come over. But the main reason is that they are, after all, the flesh and blood of the story, the ones the things happen to, or who make things happen. So they have to be capable of being changed by what goes on, as people would change. You have to know their tricks of speech and the way they stand or walk, the way their hair grows, as well as you know the inward minds of them – or better, because I find they often surprise me by acting autonomously out of inward impulses I have not learnt. The way different people behave in difficult conditions has always fascinated me. The second book I wrote (in twelve exercise books) was largely devoted to a group of people who got separated into smaller groups, and then to exploring these smaller groups, each of which surprised and fascinated me by developing a group dynamic I had not expected. The one I expected to make the decisions did not always do so. By the time I had written THE END in the twelfth exercise book, I knew all of them so well that I could draw pictures of them in characteristic attitudes.
![dreamersunited:
[Image description: a white mug containing hot chocolate on a white saucer from above. Over the hot chocolate the text reads “They call it hot chocolate. It’s good.” ]
By far one of the cuter moments of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. And it’s true, hot chocolate is awesome. :D](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lnhftdyqeP1qau2nqo1_400.jpg)
