Great EL Doctorow quote on the nature of writing. I've been giving this a lot of thought as I go into the home stretch on my next novel (which is as long as the other two put together), and plot out the second half of my fourth novel and go to work on speculating about the fifth, which Charlie Stross and I plotted out in London last month, after running into each other in a bookstore, quite by accident. You know, the other Doctorow is a hell of a novelist — in particular, books like Ragtime and Book of Daniel (the narrator of which is supposedly based on Abbie Hoffman!) inspire me more with each successive reading.
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining,
researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is
writing. Writing is writing. . . . Writing is like driving at night in the
fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole
trip that way.
