Bat Day/(Eagleton 130)

One of the great pleasures of the process of writing fiction is the (infrequent, for me) feeling that everything you do, every decision you make in your normal life, somehow informs or enriches the work. You try a different grocery store and the difference in routine heightens your awareness of the layout of the aisles, the logic of the produce islands. It all seems eminently (and likely also imminently) describable. Then the checker makes a joke, and the joke contains a word that is the exact word your narrator was searching for in the scene you were in the middle of writing when you decided you needed ingredients for dinner. It goes on like this. Moments suggest lines; fragments and scraps of life seem to pause while you find language for them (and the language you find either fits within or expands the tone and style of the story you're working on).

Part of the pleasure I'm talking about is ... you know that these moments are not really special--but you have made them so by being 1. excited about the story, and 2. open to atmospheric/suggested language.