Writing
The book was conceived as a sequel to Dick's VALIS, though it shares no characters and virtually no plot elements with the other book. The Divine Invasion was conceived immediately after the completion of Valis, with the working title VALIS regained. Dick did not begin actually writing the novel until March 1980 (more than a year after VALIS's completion in November 1978), when he wrote it in less than a month. The opening chapters were based on the Dick short story Chains of Air, Web of Aethyr which had been written between VALIS and The Divine Invasion, and published before either in 1980 in Stellar Science-Fiction Stories #5.
Read more about this topic: The Divine Invasion
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“I cannot express the pleasure I have in writing down my thoughts [in her journal], at the very moment—my opinion of people when I first see them, and how I alter, or how confirm myself in it—and I am much deceived in my foresight, if I shall not have very great delight in reading this living proof of my manner of passing my time, my sentiments, my thoughts of people I know, and a thousand other things in future.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.”
—Günther Grass (b. 1927)
“In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some monied corporation, or some dangler, who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But through every clause and part of speech of the right book I meet the eyes of the most determined men; his force and terror inundate every word: the commas and dashes are alive; so that the writing is athletic and nimble,—can go far and live long.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)