You

The single most helpful information a writer needs when embarking on a new project is the answer to the question "Who are you?"

For a number of your earlier years spent learning the basics of the craft, you believed the mere fact of considering yourself a writer was sufficient cause to take on another project.  This might have had something to do with having seen too many Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney movies of the "Let's put on a show in the garage" theme.  More probable, you gave no thought to the matter, in metaphor wading in without testing the water; pulling the cork out of the bottle, then throwing it away; imagining who the publisher would be even before the work was completed.

There was the idea, buzzing about like a radio-controlled model airplane.  Perhaps even one or two characters had stopped by to audition for staring roles.  There was, however, no you, no governing force, no awareness of the source of the idea nor from whence came the energy.  Was it revenge?  Was it a desire to take down some individual or institution that you felt had gone too far (this time or any time)?  Were you approaching the idea to right a perceived wrong?  Alas, again we return to one of two operant memes.  You were on your way to becoming a writer, which should, after all, stand for justification, shouldn't"t it?  (No, it shouldn't.)

The other accepted response had you fresh from reading something that disappointed you or angered you for having wasted your time and expectations, thus you would satirize it.  Disclosure:  you had no full idea what satire was at the time other than to make fun of something you didn't like.

Even now, in sympathetic retrospect, you can see some justification to both these approaches in what you prefer to think of as your close-but-no-cigar days.  But you do not justify a story.  You do not argue it into place any more than you give it any kind of dimension by more or less setting it down in an expanded outline form.  You need to get inside it, understand what it wants from you, then dramatize it, removing the feeble and unnecessary lines of dialogue and the details of equal irrelevance.

Who you are is the attitudes you have to the subject matter, to the material as it has effect on you in real life, the discovery you make from experiencing it, and the negotiated settlement you see your characters achieving after they have spent some time away from you, in another metaphorical dimension of the jury room.

You have to be willing to let them--the characters--interact if the work is fiction.  You must back off to allow conflicting ideas to work their ways on each other if the material is nonfiction.  If the material is intended as autobiographical, you must be aware of the differences between what happened in actuality and what outcomes you had hoped in fantasy, then be willing to switch the medium from autobiography to fiction if the outcome is too favorable and too fantastic.

Are you producing revisionist history or the fiction of discovery and illustration?  Who, indeed, are you?

A portion of who you are is rooted in your early belief in the written word. For some considerable time, you asked little more than event from the words you read, whether they were about real things or characters you understood to be invented.  Words and the sentences they formed bore tangible facts.  No nuances, no shades.  You lived in a world, where your expectations and perceptions were literal.  What you saw was what you got, except that such a calculus was never quite enough.

You wanted more than literal.

You wanted more than mere black or white or true or false or yes or no.

You wanted story.

And so, for the next several years, again in metaphor, you consulted the literary equivalent of recipe books, which is to say books on writing, the very first of which wasWriting Magazine Fiction,which had to be worthwhile, didn't it, because it was published by a man who taught courses in professional writing at a university.  This is somewhat of an irony, a quality inherent in many stories, because your most recently published book contained a number of things you'd learned from teaching courses in professional writing at a university.  That is, of course, another story.

Not long after encountering that book and attempting to integrate its vision and information, you were led to believe that university life was not the best prospect for you, rather that you'd do well to consider an institution in Los Angeles called the Frank Wiggins Trade School, where you could pursue a path whereby you would learn to operate typesetting machines such as the Linotype, the monotype, and the Ludlow headline casting machine.

In a real sense, the vision you were led to believe was not a good prospect for you and the vision you were led to believe was more apt were distractions or diversions, parts of other stories.  And thus you learned a first basic, about story not being linear.  That, too, is another story.

And so you have lived with, considered, written, edited, and yes, taught as well, one story after another for long enough to understand how distraction and diversion are vital elements in your life, in the life of the Real World, and in the shimmering and expanding world of story.

Writing a book is like having cancer.

Never mind how the loss occurred.  Never mind that you had an external hard drive for back-up and were using a Google feature to store text off of your hard drive.  The thing to mind is your loss of the two hundred odd pages of manuscript you'd written.

Another thing to mind is how, after a week or two of what you considered shrewd, hopeful attempts to recover what you'd lost, you began a forced march toward Dr. Kubler-Ross's Fifth Stage which, although it related to death, could well relate to the final stage of loss, the stage of acceptance.

The final thing to mind is how, in this space, somewhere between 2009 and 2010, you began recasting the entire project under the lion's head logo of your blog site, rewriting the work to the point at which you'd lost it, then carrying it beyond that point to a place where you were as content with a completed first draft as you were able to be.

A number of revisions and a serious progression of edits and copyediting later, you reached that fifth stage of acceptance again.  You accepted the fact that your project was completed.  The only other thing you could do at the time was pose for the author's photo which appears on the back cover.  Then you waited until that moment when you could heft a printed, bound book in your hand.

You'd already done the next thing in the process of emotional and logical activity.  You'd asked yourself the existential question, "What next?"  You spoke it aloud, calling yourself by name.  "What next, Lowenkopf?"

Then you settled in to listen for the answer.

As most of your answers about such things tend to do, this one overwhelmed you.  You needed an index card to write down all the answers you got to your existential question.  The length and variety of your answer required you to write in a small scrawl in order to accommodate the details.  Once again, you were forced to the mathematics of computing the number of probable years of life you had in a statistical sense, against which you compared the list of projects, against which you arrived at a Zen-like conclusion that on a statistical basis, you'd probably not live long enough to finish all the works you'd listed.  To this calculus, you added the probability of encountering yet other projects of potential engagement-level interest to you, with the usual recognition that you stood a great chance of meeting death fifty percent happy to have so many interesting projects and fifty percent sad at not being able to get them all done.  You interpret this kind of dis-equilibrium to mean you'd die happy.

You have in fact begun another project.  Typical of you, you've cheated by starting two others as well, your excuse being your enthusiasm was so great that you did not wish to lose the sense of velocity and energy beginnings bring to you.  In some ways, you know yourself well.

Somewhere between wakefulness and sleep this morning, you decided to do for this first work in progress the equivalent of what you did with The Fiction Writers' Handbook. You decided to do your warm-ups for it here, even at times setting down notes or actual drafts for portions of the text.

Since the new project is to be about writing again, to get all your thoughts about writing out of the way in order to allow you closer access to the two novels, you need to address the issue for yourself of why another book on writing when there are already so many and indeed your latest is today number four on the Kindle nonfiction list.

Everyone seems to want to write a book about writing, a mystery, and a memoir.  Your two novels are indeed mysteries and you've blunted the sense of need to write a memoir by writing in a nostalgic way in these blog entries about your life at various times and in various places.

In a real sense, writing a book is like having cancer.  Every cancer is different.  Every book should be different.  Every writing process should be different if it is not to fall into the trap of being derivative.  When you realized your cancer was not like other cancers, you were able with sang froid that amazed you then to say in effect to the oncologist after your eleven hours in surgery, That's it.  No chemo, thank you.  No radiation, thank you.  Check-ups?  Okay, but no more invasions of the body as it is currently constituted.

Your writing process, although not patterned, is not like too many processes of other writers you know.  There are other editor-teachers with views on writing that more or less parallel yours, but they are not congruent.  You write to serve and describe your process.  You write to discover things.  Perhaps this one additional book, Lowenkopf on Fiction Writing,will teach you yet enough more to help you through these two novels that blink at you, sending you lights from distant stars.

Why another book on writing?  Because your writing self is evolving and as an editor and teacher, you believe every writer's self should be evolving, thus your new book on storytelling will show you how to get where you wish to be and what you believe you have to see and feel in order to perform at that level, and so you will in a real sense be giving away the store, showing how "it," the writing of story, is done, the better to write the stories you've grown to need to write.

Does this open the possibility of you needing to do yet another book on writing after you've had at the novels?

There is always a memoir, but then, isn't a book on writing a memoir of story?

You didn't answer the question.

Writers don't give direct answers to questions, they work toward discovery.

The Appearance of Secrets in Story

This morning, as you have for many Friday mornings, you arrived at Peet's Coffee Shop on upper State Street at about seven, hopeful of securing on of the larger tables, where a group of friends customarily meet for breakfast and socializing.

In anticipation of being first, you, of equal custom, bring things to read, book reviews, magazines, perhaps a book or your newly acquired Kindle Fire digital reader.  Coffee and oatmeal ordered, you spread out a London Review of Books, then settled in to read.  Before long, you were aware of a lanky, middle-aged woman with a taut oval face and longish hair, standing before you.  "I just wanted to say,"  she told you, "that I think it a shame you've stopped making pictures.  I resent this cult of youth that seems to have cropped up in the movie industry."

You sent a sympathetic smile at the woman, then you told her that if you were the person she thought you were, you'd have died four years ago, almost to the day.  Today was not the first time you have been mistaken for this individual.  Probably has something to do with the eyebrows.

Some time last week, an individual who in all probability has never set eyes on you sent you a text message informing you that "We're waiting dinner on you."  The message was signed, if you can call an initial a signature, L.  You spent some time trying to deduce who L. could be and who the we might be and why "they" would be waiting dinner on me.  You would not be who you are if you wrote everything down in your 2013 Day Minder, although since this is early enough in 2013, with a good ninety percent of the year left, you are at the point where you still note appointments in it (because it has not yet gone missing in the blizzard of things on your desk).

Either singularly or as the result of a group vote, L. opted to play the impatient card by sending you another text.  "Most inconsiderate."  This came as you were pecking out a disclaimer, in which you expressed the sincere belief that L. had the wrong cyber number.  You deleted that, then rose a notch on the moral high ground by answering, "None of us is who or what we seem to be, least of all me, who does not know you and suggests you sent your text to the wrong person."  You signed your text S., which gave you great satisfaction because a former girlfriend used to refer to you as S. on her blog posts.

Some time later, L. texted you an apology.  You were never able to learn if the apology was the result of the person who was not you making his appearance or the full meaning of your text becoming clear or a combination of the two.  You were able to achieve and provide closure by asking what the main dish was and hoping it was enjoyed, after being informed it was beef Stroganoff.

You've had enough experience with being mistaken for someone you are not to have become fascinated with the ongoing sense of disconnect that appears to be a part of human behavior.  In one of your notebooks, a short story is under way in which an individual you're trying to make as unlike you as possible is mistaken at a coffee shop for a man his wife is having an affair with.  The consequences are that the more the man tries to assure his accuser that he does not know the wife in question, much less have an intimate relationship with her, the more the husband becomes convinced the man is indeed his wife's lover.

You also have experiences (note:  more than one) wherein you are not the person you thought or hoped yourself to be, a judgement arising from some moment of fecklessness, indecision, sudden gruffness, naivete, or, by your lights, a complete inability to explain to yourself why you behaved as you did (or did not behave as you in fact did not) in a certain collision of events, choices, and responses.

Mysteries have fascinated you from your early teens, taking you through the Edgar Allen Poe and Sherlock Holmes mysteries into the Ellery Queen mysteries, the Nero Wolfe, and beyond, into the seemingly mystical worlds of adult entanglements where personal relationships were more exciting than unraveling the motivations of who or what force could have driven the characters to behave as they did.

Some detective or other would eventually solve the riddle, but you were left with the impression of the rest of the dramatis personae, the cast, the troupe, the ensemble, having that one problem brought to closure but by no means any of the others.

As one by one the Friday regulars either show up to sit at the table you've saved or stop by for a hug, a touch, and some brief exchange, you wonder all over again how accurate your vision of them or theirs of you.  Perhaps you should say "them," for particularly among those who stop by for a hug or the verbal equivalent of a personal Post-It note, you see some of them in other, fleeting glimpses of relationships and mysteries.  You watch them and wonder if you are attracted to them for the potentials of friendship or your imagined scenarios of their secrets, and of course theirs of and about you.

Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry

Early in your writing career, your then literary agent suggested you consider moving beyond pulp magazines and their action-oriented narrative focus.  "The slicks,"  he said.  "That's a good place for you.  There's more room for humor in the slicks."

By "slicks," he meant magazine printed on coated stock, magazines printed on paper which, as it was being produced, had talcum pressed into its surface, the better to absorb ink and to enhance the paper's ability to reproduce photographs.  Some, but by no means all, slick magazines in circulation at the time were Esquire, True, Cosmopolitan, The New Yorker, Argosy, and Playboy.

Each of these magazines had budgets which allowed them to pay their authors considerably more than the payment you were used to receiving. Many, if not all, these magazines carried within their pages advertisements from the Arthur Murray Dance Studios, an organization comprised of franchised arenas in which individuals such as yourself could, as the advertising promised, achieve confidence on the ballroom floor.

At the time, you felt confident enough on the ballroom floor, but not so much as a dancer than as a conversationalist or, failing that, confident as a person who knew his way around a short story.  Each of the Arthur Murray Dance Studios advertisements had an illustration, captioned "Arthur Murray's Magic Step."  Were you to follow the diagram, you would be on your way to achieving enough muscle memory to achieve parity with the fox trot, a form of dancing so widespread and popular that it withstood a cultural onslaught known as jitterbugging and is, in fact, still part of the dance floor vocabulary.

Being able to do the Arthur Murray Magic Step, thus achieving some progress toward the metaphoric black belt of true ballroom floor confidence, still reminds you of your high school crush, Lita, whom you admired greatly.  More than once, Lita was apt to remind you that your attempts at fox trot reminded her of the fox fart.

Your attempts to move over to, into, and other suitable prepositions which suggest learning, understanding, and ability, the slicks meant a deliberate and persistent study of slick magazines, activity that brought you face to face with the Arthur Murray Dance Studios advertisement on a regular basis.

By this time, Lita, more of a mood to establish a firm, formal relationship, moved on to a plateau involving early marriage.  This left  you more or less on your own to consider learning to write, learning to write action-based short stories, thinking you might become a journalist, thinking you might find satisfaction writing for television, thinking you might find the cultural equivalency of ballroom confidence with such potential partners as Janet, Enriqueta, Bobbie, and Joe-Ann.

Of the hundreds of slick magazines you studied and the individuals whose stories and essays you read, along with the enormous stacks of rejection slips you collected, Arthur Murray's Magic Step served as a common denominator.  How simple life would become, you decided at one point, if there were a magic step you could approximate.  Then you could achieve slick confidence.

There are no such formulas for you.

Things achieved through formula are mobius strips, appearances of more than one dimension until closer examination reveals only the one and as well the trick whereby the appearance is achieved.  Individuals who rely on formula are the equivalents of Archie and Betty and Veronica.

Lives lived according to a formula are on a collision course with Reality.  Some experiences with loss, despair, and frustration, none of them comfortable or comforting, seem a necessity in order to supply a leavening force that allows the yeast to rise once again, the confidence to be had on the ballroom floor to be established somehow, once more.

Listen, Lita.

They're playing our song.

It appears to be a foxtrot.

Alternate Universes and the Writing Life

You find yourself with some regularity leaving the quiet and distraction-free work area of your home in favor of one of two or three coffee shops with an increased level of ambient noise, random distractions, and the additional potential of having to fend off some well-intended conversation.

At these venues, which you rank according to your perception of which serves the best latte, you bring note pads, pens, books, magazines, and often your laptop computer, your intended target one or more projects such as a weekly book review, an additional book review, class notes,an editing job, notes for a blog essay, or work on a larger project such as a book-in-the-works.

Peets has splendid coffee but is often crowded with academics, fleeing the call of office hours, or of students busily texting friends elsewhere, or bible study groups.  The French Press has begun serving a superior coffee, but its original venue has parking problems and its newer one on Cota and Anacapa is noisy.  The funky ambience of Cafe Luna is easiest to concentrate in, but its coffee is a distant third.

Your implements and trappings spread about you on a table, coffee close to hand, you set forth to accomplish here in a noisier, less comfortable place what you left a comfortable, quieter, more convenient place to engage, the coffee you make at home on your Bialetti stovetop at least the equal of Cafe Luna's larger, steam-driven machine, thanks in no small part to the fact of your freezer being filled with various incarnations of Peet's beans.

The irony is not lost on you, is in fact a deliberate infliction of outside influences, endured in the belief that the necessary focus to blot out these sensory gatecrashers will allow you here to do with some ease what you could not do at home.

This condition is a correlative to your belief that having chores such as teaching and editing outside your writing goals will contribute to making you use your writing time to better advantage.  This condition also falls well within the turf of irony.

In an alternate universe, your working day would be eight to ten hours in which you would variously read, write, listen to music, take the occasional nap, leaving you fourteen to sixteen hours in which to dine, maintain your dog, car, and apartment, sleep, socialize, exercise, educate yourself, indulge your needs for recreation and associations with friends.  This alternate universe is blatant speculative fiction.  Had you the means and opportunity to lead this imaginary life, you believe the high possibility that the eight-to-ten-hour work day would deteriorate in direct proportion to the inner, unarticulated whims driving you even now as you set these words down.

How easy it is to to infuse our goals and ideals with a metric of perfection, how easy to admire the focus and concentration of mad persons, individuals so intent on their goal that they must be at complete union with it rather than the lesser focus most of us bring to the game.  In this case the game is the art we engage in our attempts to achieve a goal with such diverse results as entertainment, education, warnings, panegyrics, satires, revelations, or a combination of any two or more of these.  The final score of the game is the weight and measure of the work we bring forth and the effect that work will have on others.  

Cause--the driving force(s) behind the creation of the work--and effect--the impact of the work on its audience, are in the same kind of uneasy alliance as, say Christians and lions.  At one time in history, lions were eating Christians.  Today, the occasional lion might nosh on an occasional Christian, but there is a greater likelihood that the occasional Christian will send a lion packing off to a zoo.

All work and no play makes you a candidate for becoming a tendentious writer.  All play and no work puts you on a vector for becoming a wannabe writer, whose best work never leaves his mind.  A footnote here is the stipulation that play is work in its juvenile form.   Another footnote should be that work may be playful in nature.

A saving grace of particular significance to your ironic coffee shop pleasures is the sense you often get, having filled several notepad pages, of eagerness to get home, get the handwritten work transcribed, then printed out for editing, which for you is always best done at home. 

Journeys, Written, Inner, and Outer

With a few notable exceptions, younger protagonists tend to be outward and oriented to action while older protagonists tend to be more inner and reflective.

Holden Caulfield was notable for his innerness, but he, as so many of Salinger's characters, young and older, is close to some kind of break.  Gregor Samsa has, by virtue of his metamorphosis into a beetle, gone inner.  Huck Finn trod that fine line between inner and outer, and for three-quarters of his eponymous venture, represented his author at the top of his form. The one place where Twain appeared in complete form was the near memoir, Life on the Mississippi.  

You hereby venture that Huck Finn, for those first pages, was a fantasy memoir, of Twain using fiction to rewrite his own upbringing, a theory that makes even more sense when you account for reasons why he brought Tom Sawyer back at about the place where things began to fall apart.  Tom was a mischief, and before you reached the stage of your own life where you were able to attach other meanings and interpretations to things, you envied and wanted to be Tom.  You wanted to be that carefree mischief of a boy who would begin to morph into recognizable respectability.

Dangerous as it is to attribute direct links between the behavior of characters and the attitudes and behavior of their creators, Charles Dickens's Pip, that other remarkable first-person narrative, was in some ways Dickens himself, led through a turmoil of class distinctions, social ups and downs, and financial flights.  Poor Pip was manipulated by The System, as personified by Miss Haversham.

For the longest time, you did not wish to spend time with characters much given to thoughts and inner reflections.  You wished movement, action, and story where action and result led to outcomes rather than story where questions and inner investigations led to change.

Only when lead characters began to stumble over their own naivete did you begin to see the pattern throughout your entire reading where you could with some reason question the intelligence of the character.  Only then did you begin to suspect yourself of being a naive reader who had, somewhere along the way begun to wish to include himself among published authors who entertained.

This last wish brought you the trouble of hoping to entertain to the point of neglecting some of the physical essentials of craft.  Artists have an understanding of what distorted horizons and perspective will do to the eye of the observer.  Musicians have an understanding of what dissonance and discord will cause within the sensitivity of the listener.  If you could entertain, you reasoned in your naivete, you could intrigue the reader into remaining.

The result of such reasoning led you to examine stand-up comedians who quite often became so desperate to entertain that they had to resort to bullying their audiences.  Living in the same part of town as Jonathan Winters, you were able to see this dynamic over a large span of time, wherein he literally trapped tourists, holding them hostage in what at first appeared to be an improvised performance for them alone, but after a while, the entertainment was gone, the tourists had the look of frightened rabbits, waiting for their chance to dart for safety, away from the constant patter, the growing intensity of Winter's genius gone amok, his rhetoric becoming more frantic, all the while funny, but out-of-control.

Withhold, you told yourself, each time you saw such antics.  Withhold rhetoric and outcome.  In particular, withhold the sense of being driven.  Rely instead on the sense of being amused, concerned.

Do not, you warned yourself, write for an audience because an audience as such is an angry mob, waiting to happen.  Write instead to amuse yourself.   It is one thing to hold an audience in place with rhetoric and dramatic device, it is something entirely different to cause an audience to care about fictional characters and to see you as the filter for those individuals, whom the audience believes more than it believes you.

There were times, say the 60s and 70s of the past century, where the audience wanted to be led past the conventional stop signs, into the back alleys of profligacy.  You often followed those audiences in the things you wrote and read and wished for.  Giving audiences what they want is not always going to provide good results nor is giving yourself what you want a guarantee of anything better emerging.

Audiences are drawn to characters who want things.  As someone who himself wants things, you understand this attraction.  You want many things, story among them.  You want story that is neither overt in its comfort nor inconsiderate in its wish to disturb and provoke awareness.

You particularly do not want the calculus where the troubled genius of someone like Jonathan Winters approaches true artistry as his anger evades its guardians and comes storming forth.  Humor is a lever, toppling pretense and undercutting the foundation of the moral high ground.  Humor can and does cause us to laugh at our individual self and the behavior of the self when alone and in society.  Humor thus can make us aware of being uneasy.  Twain, even at his angriest, had this ability.  His humor lights the darkened caves of your own anger and frustration.

This leads you to the awareness that laughing at yourself is the surest way to begin any journey of reflection and understanding.

Captain Spaulding and the Writing Process

By most accounts, a process is a series of actions which were arrived at through trial and error or some previous design, with the intent of providing a desired result.

The process by which you are able to produce one or more keepable pages of text has undergone an evolutionary process from your early days of trying to produce keepable pages right up until the present moment where this page (presumably to be judged worth keeping) will have morphed.

Call it an irony in the making, if you wish, or be content to think of it as mere naivete; the fact nevertheless remains that while you were in those early days trying to produce keepable page, you had no thought of it being any part of any process; in your naivete, you were much in the moment, also a condition you did not assign much thought (because you were too busy being in the moment).

If the evolution is in fact an irony, you have now evolved to the state of trying to find a moment and achieve a kind of unity with it in pursuit of the goal of keepable pages.

In many ways, the tern "keepable pages" is an abstraction, thus part of your process is the ongoing attempt to particularize the abstraction to the point where, as near as you can bring it, the keepable page is a tight replica of the unity and partnership between you and the subject.  The sophistry here comes from the entire process originating within you and your increasing efforts to delegate authority to the characters if the work you have undertaken is dramatic or ideas if the work is a narrative such as a review or essay.

The work, whether fiction or non, is you, reflecting the evolutionary journey you've undertaken, while at the same time earning its "keepability" by reflecting the energy and personality of the characters or ideas.

When you are pursuing process now, almost as though you were some guide out on a safari or hunt, and find your way into unity with the characters and/or ideas, you experience an inner ripple beyond any sense of joy or of dogs riding in a moving car, with their head out the window. Instead, you give the inner ripple of feeling the name of glee, a sense of connection with your early self and its wild, unarticulated visions and goals.

In more sober moments, you refer to such feelings as having found your voice, although dwelling on that trope often brings you to admit you'd not thought your voice was lost--you simply hadn't learned to pay it the heed you now pay it.  You are more likely now to have lost your voice than you were before you were aware of having one or in those early days when your literary voice reminded you of the sound of your physical voice while you were going through a process called puberty.

Not long ago, you came across a photo of Julius Henry Marx, studious in his regard for a book he was apparently reading.  The photo caused reflections and self-examinations of the sorts visited in the previous paragraphs.  Seriousness and studiousness were the end results of the process you set in motion, seemingly without design, only with regard for the outcome.  The real process, the voice that wished to be heeded was more of a creation of Julius Henry Marx, Captain Geoffrey Spaulding.

Captain Spaulding is the analog of the Trickster.  He represents to you what his creator represents.  He is Julius Henry Marx having gone through the process of becoming Groucho Marx to the completed image of a take-down of all pretension and high-faluting status.  He is at once the great Enforcer and the Leveler.

Even more than Groucho, Captain Spaulding is your Super Hero.  With him and Mark Twain as your guides, your mentors, you have walked the twisty trails and improvised alleys of your process, your dark moments and frequent battles with your craft made a bearable mischief by the awareness that in your imagination, they walk with you.

Process is a willingness to walk in the darkness with nothing but a stub or two of candle, imaginary companions, and a decent pen for taking notes as you feel your way along.