Life & Wisdom Quote by Colleen McCullough

Writing, McCullough suggests, is a tussle between appetite and authority. Her characters "take the bit between their teeth" is a vivid theft from horse-handling: the animal ignores the rider and surges forward on its own will. In craft terms, its a confession that the most alive figures in fiction start pushing past outline, theme, even the author's mood. The line flatters the character as an autonomous force, but it also flatters the novelist: only a strong rider gets dragged.

Then she pivots to control: "dragging them back to the straight and narrow". The phrase carries moral freight, as if narrative discipline were a kind of virtue and deviation a flirtation with sin. Subtext: spontaneity is useful, but only within boundaries set by the book's architecture. McCullough isn't romanticizing the "muses" so much as describing a workflow where surprise is welcomed as raw material and then edited into coherence. The "however" is the tell; liberation has limits.

Context matters: McCullough wrote big, sweeping historical and family sagas where plot logistics, period detail, and long arcs demand governance. In that kind of fiction, character freedom can become self-indulgence fast, a detour that breaks the contract with readers who came for momentum and design. Her intent feels practical, even slightly stern: let the characters run so you can discover something real, then rein them in so the story remains inevitable rather than merely eventful.