On patience

There is, I am told, a kind of writer who plans his book like a general plans a campaign. He knows the chapters before he knows the sentences. He sees the architecture before he sees the bricks. I have never been one of these writers, and after twenty years of trying I am no longer ashamed of it.

I write the way I walk: a long, slow loop, and then a longer one, and then I find I have arrived somewhere by accident, and the route I took is the only route there is. The map I draw afterward is a kind of fiction. The walk was the truth.

I tell you this because I think the great enemy of writing is not the empty page; it is impatience. The wish to know, before you have written it, what you are writing. The wish to be done. The wish to skip past the part of the work where you do not yet know what you think.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.

I copied this sentence into a notebook when I was twenty. It is the first sentence I ever underlined, and I underline it again every few years, when I have forgotten it again.

The questions in your work are not problems to be solved before you can begin. They are the work. They are the part you are paid for, if you are lucky enough to be paid; the part you do for love, if you are not. Sit with them. Let them stay open. Write a sentence that does not yet know what it means, and read it tomorrow, and write the next one.

This is not a recipe. There is no recipe. But there is, perhaps, a posture: the posture of a person willing to not yet know.

Begin there. Stay there as long as you can stand it. The book — if you have one in you — will arrive.