How awesome is your piece :)

Hey~ Not sure if this is the place for this, but anywho.

Do you ever get this? You're editing, slaving over sentences, trying to make your work good, ect. Then you get to a line, or something a character says, or a plot point, and even if the rest of it was crap, you suddenly think:

I/my characters/my plot/my setting/my climax/my turning point/my prose

is damn brilliant.

I think it's possibly the only thing that keeps me from fading into my cup of coffee when I'm line editing.

Just wondered if anyone else got that If so, what was it that made you go: If I was an agent/publisher ect, I would option out movie rights on that "thing" alone.

For me, it's my characters, and one paragraph of prose. That's it - the rest needs a hell of a lot of work.

But that stuff makes it worthwhile

Everyone is delisional about this sort of thing. But it's nice to have those bits, to have that hope that everything will be to that standard one day.

Depends what you mean by brilliant I think. Yes - a lot of sentences and prose I like gets the cut. But to me the things that are brilliant are the ones that do their job with as much powerful as possible - thus giving meaning and dragging the reader head first into the book. Often for me, they take a lot of work and a lot of drafts to actually get any in the first place. So if you like, the pretty ones are at the start, and they give you the moral booster to keep going. Then you go and hack and cut and sweat, and the occasional brilliant, succinct sentence that does its job excellently without jumping up and down is your reward at the end.
I don't know. They both keep me going. And it's not just prose - I don't know many writers who would go back to their story day in day out if they didn't adore their characters, or at least find in interesting to see what they would do if tortured constantly by the plot.
So I think both types are good - their place in a published work takes more thinking on, however

Renee Collins said:

Sometimes I will be reading my work, and a very warm, calm feeling will come over me. It's not: "I'm brilliant!" It's more: "Yes. This is exactly how I want it to read."

Click to expand...

Even better than that, I think, is when you give it to other people (alphas, betas ect) and they agree.

(Although sometimes the information ect that they get from you writing is actually not what you meant - but better. That's quite weird for me. Because technically you've failed, but you've come up with a better interpretation.)