"I keep hoping I’ll find a more efficient way to work, but so far I’ve found no good substitute for generating a whole lot of words and deciding later which of them I want to keep."

One thing that occurred to me as I read over the interview was that writing never gets easier exactly, but it does get easier to tolerate how difficult it is. Now that I have five books behind me, along with hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles (not to mention a large cache of unpublished work), I have a lot more confidence that if I keep writing, I'll eventually find a way out of whatever thicket I've managed to get myself into. I've also learned that subtraction is a wonderful thing. While I'm always tempted to add more material to whatever I'm working on, at some point I'm forced to start cutting. And when I do, I am struck with wonder at how much clarity and beauty emerges simply by removing the clutter of extra words, ideas, sentences, and digressions.