the writing of a novel, or the telling of a story, is an activity that takes place at a slow pace—in low gear, so to speak. Faster than walking, let’s say, but slower than riding a bicycle. The basic speed of a person’s mental processes may make it possible to work at that rate, or it may not. For the most part, novelists are trying to convert something present in their consciousness into a story. Yet there is an inevitable gap between the preexisting original and the new shape it is spawning. That creates a dynamic the novelist can use as a kind of lever in the fashioning of his narrative.
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