Further to the link I posted last week about the psychic division between the writer as author and the writer as human being
, here’s author Chris Womersley writing for the Untitled Books website about the delicate splitting of the self
that comes with producing a work of fiction:
The fellow who does the dishes, forgets people’s names, ferociously bites his nails and eats porridge for breakfast — the everyday me, in other words — and the one who performs the slightly dreamy act of writing are, subtly, different. The everyday me doesn’t actually narrate my works of fiction. Instead it is the writerly version of myself — the one with access to the (hopefully) best possible word, who can spend months revisiting sentences to ensure they are just right, who can see the structure of the story being told, who understands his characters; the one who rearranges.