‘Some days I have no understanding what I’ve written till I read it back. It’s a life with shocks built in’Some writers claim to extrude a book at an even rate like toothpaste from a tube,or to build a narrative like a wall, so many feet per day. They sit at their desk and knock off their word quota, or then frisk into their leisured evening,preening themselves.
This is so alien to me that it might be another trade entirely. Writing lectures or reviews – any kind of non-fiction – seems to me a job like any job: allocate your time, marshall your resources, and just get on with it. But fiction makes me the servant of a process that has no clear beginning and end or method of measuring achievement. I don’t write in sequence. I may have a dozen versions of a single scene. I might spend a week threading an image through a narrative,but moving the narrative not an inch. A book grows according to a subtle and deep-laid diagram. At the end, I see what the diagram was.
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Source: theguardian.com