[00:00.75]Passage 91. What Every Writer Wants

[00:07.10]I have known very few writers, but those I have known, and whom I respect,

[00:13.67]confess at once that they have little idea where they are going

[00:17.60]when they first set pen to paper.

[00:20.89]They have a character, perhaps two;

[00:23.62]they are in that condition of eager discomfort which passes for inspiration;

[00:27.89]all admit radical changes of destination once the journey has begun;

[00:33.26]one, to my certain knowledge,spent nine months on a novel about Kashmir,

[00:39.16]then reset the whole thing in the Scottish Highland.

[00:43.10]I never heard of anyone making an “outline”, as we were taught at school.

[00:48.02]In the breaking and remaking,in the timing, interweaving,beginning again,

[00:54.04]the writer comes to discern things in his material which were not consciously in his mind when he began.

[01:00.93]This organic process, often leading to moments of extraordinary self-discovery,

[01:07.39]is of an indescribable fascination.

[01:11.11]A blurred image appears; he adds a brushstroke and another, and it is gone;

[01:17.45]but something was there, and he will not rest till he has captured it.

[01:22.70]Sometimes the passion within a writer outlives a book he has written.

[01:27.96]I have heard of writers who read nothing but their own books;

[01:32.88]like adolescents they stand before the mirror,

[01:35.94]and still cannot understand the exact outline of the vision before them.

[01:40.32]For the same reason, writers talk endlessly about their own books,

[01:45.58]digging up hidden meanings, super-imposing new ones, begging response from those around them.

[01:52.46]Of course a writer doing this is misunderstood:

[01:56.73]he might as well try to explain a crime or a love affair.

[02:00.79]He is also, incidentally, an unforgivable bore.

[02:05.92]This temptation to cover the distance between himself and the reader,

[02:11.39]to study his image in the sight of those who do not know him,

[02:14.45]can be his undoing:he has begun to write to please.

[02:19.82]A young English writer made the pertinent observation a year or two back

[02:25.29]that the talent goes into the first draft, and the art into the drafts that follow.

[02:30.65]For this reason also the writer, like any other artist,has no resting place,

[02:36.99]no crowd or movement in which he may take comfort,

[02:40.50]no judgment from outside which can replace the judgment from within.

[02:44.98]A writer makes order out of the anarchy of his heart;

[02:49.90]he submits himself to a more ruthless discipline than any critic dreamed of,

[02:55.27]and when he flirts with fame, he is taking time off from living with himself,

[03:00.74]from the search for what his world contains at its inmost point.