Well tonight we’re going to sort it all out
From a Roger Ebert essay on movies and the meaning of life:
“I find that when I am actually writing, I enter a zone of concentration too small to admit my troubles. Although I might feel uneasy or unwell when I sit down at the keyboard and feel that way again when I stand up, while I am working I feel – what? There is a kind of focus or concentration, a gathering of thought, language and instinct, that occupies all the available places and purrs along satisfied with itself. I am known around the office as a “fast writer,” but while I’m engaged in the process, I don’t feel as if I’m writing at all; I’m taking dictation from that place within me that knows what it wants to say.
This has been true all of my life. When I was 15 and starting out as a sportswriter at the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, I would labor for hours over my lead paragraph. Bill Lyon, who was a year older than me and would later become a famous columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, advised me, “Get to the end of the piece before you go back to revise the beginning. Until you find out where you’re going, how can you know how to get there?” I took his advice and have never looked back. It condenses into a rule most writers discover sooner or later: The Muse visits during the work, not before it.”
