It is a struggle every time, with words that start slow and leaden, and, if I am assiduous and patient, acquire something approximating life. It hardly marked the start of my conception of what it meant to be one. Great writing – more life than life itself, truer than anything you can set your eyes on. It would be my choice whether to continue to write, and embracing that choice was what made a writer, as much as the quality of the writing itself. “Not quite there” is still how I feel when I read back my own words on the page.
