http://www.howardfrankmosher.com
Writers of the world, have you been working on
your opus without a breakthrough for years?
Take heart. The mathematician Yitang Zhang, after decades of beating his
head against a brick wall, intuited the solution to a very nearly impossible
problem involving prime numbers while walking around in a friend’s back
yard. The only remotely comparable
experience I’ve ever had was back in the summer of 2002 when virtually all of
my novel Waiting for Teddy Williams came to me in a minute or
two while I was driving very late at night on the New York State Thruway, near
Batavia. In small ways, however, I think
we clueless scribblers intuit solutions to problems of character, story,
language, and structure all the time. To
return to the field of mathematics – with a very bad pun – go figure. Still, as I was putting the finishing touches
on my own new novel (God’s Kingdom,
St. Martin’s Press, Oct. 2015), it occurred to me that when it comes to the
sources of creativity, there’s probably more in this world than is dreamt of in
anybody’s philosophy.
Thursday, March 19, 2015
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