Did I find the spirit of Christmas already?

It's an unopened, 100% juice, apple Capri Sun left on the desk of an empty English building classroom during finals week, so I'm not totally sure.

I'll keep searching.

Exactly what I need, just a few months before I need it. Thank you very much!

The obsession many writers pour into living alongside their characters, I pour into language. And out of that language, or perhaps these languages, characters emerge. Images and worlds, too. Theme, voice, pace, subtext. For me, every facet of good writing is language cunningly, carefully, wrought.

I've always felt a gap between myself & writers who experience their characters as alive, in the room with them. It just isn't how my mine work. This is not to diminish the importance of fully realized characters or the value of their living presence for many writers. It's a reminder of alterities.

"My girl always wakes up with a smile!" and Margaret would smile the best way she could, to fulfill her mother's prophecy.
POOR DEER by Claire Oshetsky

I call it "relief", though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation.

THE TURN OF THE SCREW, by Henry James

But this discovery was so great and overwhelming that all the steps by which I had been progressively led to it were obliterated, and I beheld only the result.

FRANKENSTEIN, by Mary Shelley
Bookthreads

What she doesn't see through her milky cataracts would fit in a baby's sock.

SAVING THE GLEEFUL HORSE, by K. J. Bishop