I have known very few writers, but those I have known, and whom I respected, confess at once that they have little idea where they arc going when they first set pen to paper. They have a character, perhaps two, (1)_______________________; one, to my certain knowledge, spent nine months on a novel about Kashmir, then reset the whole thing in the Scottish Highlands. I never heard of anyone making a 'skeleton', as we were taught at school. In the breaking and remaking, in the timing, interweaving, beginning afresh, the writer comes to discern things in his material which were not conseriously in his mind when he began. (2)_______________________. A blurred image appears, he adds a brushstroke and another, and it is gone; but something was there, and he will not rest till he has captured it. Sometimes the yeast within a writer outlives a book he has written.
