I work very deliberately, with a plan. But sometimes I come to a point that I planned as the end and it needs softening. Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep - it can't be done abruptly.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the careful and thoughtful process of completing a creative work, likening it to the gentle act of putting a child to sleep.
Colm Toibin's quote emphasizes the importance of intentionality and sensitivity in the creative process, particularly when completing a novel. The metaphor of ending a novel being akin to putting a child to sleep highlights the need for a gentle, gradual approach rather than a sudden, abrupt conclusion, suggesting that creators should be mindful of the emotional weight and impact of their endings.
In practice
A writer's workshop discussing the challenges of concluding a story.
You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.
History is a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing, the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources. It depends on ideology as much as voting in an election does.
Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to manage.
People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away.
It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world.
Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time.
The only logical thing I can think of is that I knew there were such things as artists, and I knew there were none where I lived. So I knew that to be an artist you had to be somewhere else. And I very much wanted to be somewhere else.
Everybody, no matter what vocation they're looking at, should add music as an essential to their curriculum. Music can be a very important part of your soul and your growth as a human being. It's so powerful.
My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.
A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
Who I am on stage is very, very different to who I am in real life.
Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
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