So, yes, it is very hard work, and there are days where there’s something I have to do in the book, something I have to learn or put myself and the characters through that I am… That makes me fearful or sorrowful. But I do think also that this aspect of writing is over reported at the expense of the pleasurable aspect as well. If writers didn’t love to be in this space between themselves and their language, they probably wouldn’t do it. You’d give up.

It takes a combination of ways to do these things, more than discipline. It’s a way of life. It’s like diet or gymnastics. You can know all the gymnastic things, all the exercises. You can know all the diets, but if you don’t do the diets, if you don’t do the exercise, it won’t work. It’s the same if you have some rules, but you don’t live them. It doesn’t work.

Right. It saves you from giving up. This present novel that will be out — Villages — I several times thought it might be a bad idea and kind of abandoned it. So, it was really the habit — the habit of writing that kept me at it in the end. It was like a bad marriage. I mean, whatever. This is the wife I’m married to here, and I’m going to finish this book. Finishing it becomes the only way to get rid of it. So yes, it’s good to have a certain doggedness to your technique.

A writer is no different than a bricklayer or a bus driver in that sense. You must have discipline. Oscar Wilde said that writing is 10 percent genius, 90 percent discipline. You must have discipline for writing. It is not an easy task. It is very lonely. You’re all alone. You are not in company. You are not enjoying yourself in that sense. You are enjoying yourself in another sense. You are delving into your depths, but you are profoundly lonely. It is one of the loneliest careers in the world. In the theater, you are with companions, with directors, actors. In film. In an office. In writing, you are alone. That takes a lot of strength and a lot of will to do it. You must really be in love with what you’re doing to tolerate the huge loneliness of writing.

Anyway, what’s the point of a plot, you know? Has life got a plot? Not that I know of. So why should a novel have a plot? But it has to have some kind of story. It has to have some kind of structure.

But my own mottos are, “Don’t imagine for a moment that you’re going to be able to express yourself.” ... And most aspiring artists think, “I have something to say.”

I think it begins as a kind of tension in space.  There’s something out there and it’s waiting for the big bang, and I have to get that into my head.  I have a composer friend in Ireland, and he beautifully said, “I have this scream in my head and I have to get it into the orchestra.  I have to get it into the music.”  But I wouldn’t be quite as dramatic as that.  But I have this tension.  I have this thing that has to be done. And the problem is, you see, once you’ve got the first paragraph down and you’ve got the tone, then the bloody book is written.  All you have to do is fill it in then, which makes it really boring.  I mean I’d like to be like one of those Japanese artists, you know, just go shoop ! and it’s done.  But no, it takes years.