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Lesson 39 What every writer wants 作家之所需 I have known very few writers, but those I have known, and whom Irespect, confess at once that they have little idea where they are going whenthey first set pen to paper. They have a character, perhaps two; they are inthat condition of eager discomfort which passes for inspiration; all admitradical changes of destination once the journey has begun; one, to my certainknowledge, spent nine months on a novel about Kashmir, then reset the wholething in the Scottish Highlands. I never heard of anyone making a skeleton, as we weretaught at school. In the breaking and remaking, in the timing, interweaving,beginning afresh, the writer comes to discern things in his material which werenot consciously in his mind when he began. This organic process, often leadingto moments of extraordinary self-discovery, is of an indescribable fascination.A blurred image appears; he adds a brushstroke and another, and it is gone; butsomething was there, and he will not rest till he has captured it. Sometimesthe yeast within a writer outlives a book he has written. I have heard ofwriters who read nothing but their own books; like adolescents they standbefore the mirror, and still cannot fathom the exact outline of the visionbefore them. For the same reason, writers talk interminably about their ownbooks, winkling out hidden meanings, super-imposing new ones, begging responsefrom those around them. Of course a writer doing this is misunderstood: hemight as well try to explain a crime or a love affair. He is also,incidentally, an unforgivable bore. | 
