The actual, tangible creation rarely measures up to the vision. The disparity can be especially great in the first stages of trying to give form to an idea, when efforts to produce something may be clumsy and misguided. It can be dispiriting—so much so that Patchett believes it’s the reason why many people never are able to write the “great novel” that is in their heads. “Only a few of us are going to be able to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of the imagination for the stark disappointment of words,” she writes. So the question that must be asked upon beginning work on an
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