NaNoWriMo is coming along.
There are certain authors whose writing's immediate impact on me is to make me despair of ever being published. Neil Gaiman is one of these. Stephen R. Donaldson, whose Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever I just recently began, is another. It's a very definite quality of prose which does this. I respect plot and want very much to do it well, but it doesn't tend to leap out of the first paragraph at me and say, "Fool, you will never compare with this!" There's a certain richness, a high ratio of thoughts expressed to words used, an exceptional number of stirring images hung elegantly on the chassis of a single sentence.
Luckily the first time this happened I resisted the urge to abandon these books and retreat to less intimidating writers. It wasn't hard, really, because apart from the terror of failure that it can inspire, rich prose can simply be a pleasure. And not very long after I would bite the bullet and read this prose which was so much better than mine, I found it had a vitalizing effect on my own writing. Not that I think I approached Gaiman or Donaldson, or Lord Dunsany (another example), but the metaphors definitely began to flow more freely.
I've come to think of my reading material like food, possibly to a fault (because I'll so seldom bother with anything that strikes me as the literary equivalent of potato chips, and my judgment isn't all that even-handed).
I glanced at the author's bio in the back of Donaldson's The Illearth War and saw that that ambitious trilogy was his publishing debut, and then miscalculated the dates to think he was first published at age 40. That was heartening to me until I found out I was wrong, since I'm always dismayed by wunderkinds who are well on their way to literary fame by my age. It turns out that Donaldson was actually 30, so, not that old, but not that young either. At least, it still left a little room for hope for this 25.99-year-old aspirant.
