24
" When writing, there are some scenes that are emotionally overwhelming. They completely overcome the author, and only when they do this can they cause a similar reaction in the reader.
Through this, the author gets to experience multiple lives. If a character's life flashes before their eyes, it flashes before the author's eyes too, and he or she remembers it as his or her own.
With reading, we get to live other lives vicariously, and this is doubly so with writing. It is like a lucid dream, where we guide the outcome. In this, we don't merely write *about* a character -- we momentarily *become* them, and walk as they walk, think as they think, and do as they do. When we return to our own life, we might return a little shaken, likely a little stronger, hopefully a little wiser.
What is certain is that we return better, because experiencing the lives of others makes us understand their aims and dreams, their fears and foils, the challenges and difficulties, and joys and triumphs, that they face. It helps us grow and empathise, and see all the little pictures that make up the bigger one we see from the omniscience of the narrator. "
― Dean F. Wilson
27
" Jacob and Whistler fled as if fear itself had manifested outside. They tripped and tumbled, but they didn't care, so long as they fell forwards and away from that horrid creature that tried to feed upon the glass. They ran down the corridor, and they heard shouts and screams from many of the other cabins, and dozens more people raced out from their rooms, leaving wide the doors, from which could be seen many more of the yellow-eyed, many-toothed monsters, trying to get inside. "
― Dean F. Wilson , Lifemaker (The Great Iron War, #2)
32
" The Hope factory was menacing in the distance, for it was one of the few buildings that somehow managed to present itself through the smog. Its hulking form consumed almost all of the horizon, and its many pistons, pillars, chimneys and flumes ate into the heavens. For the parts of the sky it could not reach, those towers sent up endless streams of smoke, and this smoke devoured the natural clouds and left an unnatural haze in the heavens. The factory was a greedy mass of brick, a ravenous form of iron. As much as it gobbled up all the landscape, it threatened that it might eat the onlookers too. "
― Dean F. Wilson , Hopebreaker (The Great Iron War, #1)