The character on the page determines the prose–its music, its rhythms, the range and limit of its vocabulary–yet, at the outset at least, I determine the character. It usually happens that the fictitious character, once released, acquires a life and will of his or her own, so the prose, too, acquires its own inexplicable fluidity. This is one of the reasons I write: to ‘hear’ a voice not quite my own, yet summoned forth by way of my own.
Joyce Carol Oates
Another Rhododendron
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