I wish that I had known back then that a mastery of process would lead to a product. Then I probably wouldn't have found it so frightening to write.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
I wanted to express myself more fully through writing and directing. It just feels like a package deal. Anytime you create anything, you try to exert mastery over your world.
Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.
The conclusion I came to was that even if I couldn't sell books, I still liked the process of writing.
If I had been a good student and an achiever, I might have been excited by a more systematic approach to writing than what I do.
One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, 'Right. Now I understand how this is done.'
It is true I had been successful on a small scale in overcoming one of the main difficulties in the new process, but there was still much to invent, and much that at that period I necessarily knew nothing about.
I hoped that it would be possible to slide slowly from my public life back to the life of teaching and writing that I had always wanted. But things didn't work out that way.
I write in a very strange way. Things are very fragmentary for a very long time, and then they come together very quickly near the end of the process.
I loved the process of writing.