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 trick is not to become somebody else. You become somebody else when you're in front of a camera or when you're on stage. There are some people who carry it all the time. That, to me, is not acting.
I've always thought of the book as a visual art form, and it should represent a single artistic idea, which it does if you write your own material.
Even now, nature is the only flame, on which the poetic spirit feeds; from it alone it draws all its power, to it alone it speaks even in the artificial, in the man engaged in culture.
I thought as an actress I would be able to have broader emotional experiences, but then I quickly figured out that I wanted to think about tragic dramas, not act in them.
When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world
I believe that the best cameraman is one who recognizes the source, the story, as the basis of his work.
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