writers, and tried to wrestle with what I still wrestle with: the stroll of the thought from the head onto the paper. I knew almost nothing about writing, but there was one thing I did know: for me, the process had to be as tightly sealed as the distillate in the cone-shaped vessel on the stove; I knew that every leakage meant death, that the magic disappeared if I looked too closely, that nothing could be divulged before it was done.
