So I got this new attitude.  Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

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.

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.

I don’t remember which writer said this, but in an interview, a prolific novelist was asked, “Do you write only when you’re inspired, or do you write all the time? Do you wait for the muse, or do you just kind of knock it out? You can just sort of spin it out?” And he said, “Well, I do wait for the muse. I write when the muse comes, but fortunately she shows up, like me, every day at 9:00 a.m.