Such small things, these lit­tle lines, these lit­tle moments, but if they res­onate with me I take them seri­ous­ly and start to look for more. If I can col­lect a few of these lit­tle islands I will start think­ing about how they might relate to each oth­er, how I might arrange them, how I might move a read­er from one to the oth­er. It’s like set­ting up an arch­i­pel­ago and a fer­ry ser­vice, too. (Most of these arch­i­pel­a­gos sink back into the sea, I should empha­size, but I only need to get one or two set up every now and then to stay busy.)

This is a peri­od of explo­ration for me. I’m not as a writer try­ing to give you some­thing I know; I’m try­ing to fig­ure some­thing out for myself. I may even­tu­al­ly end up with more of these moments than I need, for instance, or moments that don’t seem to agree with each oth­er. Some of those I may need to cut, or not. Con­tra­dic­tions can be an inter­est­ing part of a sto­ry, adding tex­ture and nuance, or they can keep it from mak­ing sense. Decid­ing which is which is part of the process.

It is not always easy but at the begin­ning of the process, espe­cial­ly, I try not to wor­ry about get­ting every­thing right. I like what John Swartzwelder, a writer for The Simp­sons, said about his process in an inter­view with The New York­er: “I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if pos­si­ble … Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been writ­ten. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done … All I have to do from that point on is fix it.” In oth­er words, fix­ing your bad writ­ing is eas­i­er than writ­ing, so get some­thing writ­ten, any­thing, and then you’re ready to get to work.

And then at some point in that fix­ing process I recall an inter­view with the writer Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez, in which he com­pared writ­ing to car­pen­try (we are switch­ing metaphors once more): “Both are full of tricks and tech­niques. Basi­cal­ly very lit­tle mag­ic and a lot of hard word are involved.”

There are those words again, hard work, yes, but what can we do? As Michael Rosen said of hunt­ing bears, “We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!” On the bright side, wor­ry­ing about going through the process — wor­ry­ing about all that fix­ing, all that car­pen­try — is always worse than actu­al­ly going through it, than actu­al­ly doing it, and indeed it is only by doing it that a true under­stand­ing of what you’re writ­ing reveals itself. An instruc­tor of mine at the School of Visu­al Arts, David San­dlin, used to remind us (used to need to remind us, over and over again), that you don’t make art by fig­ur­ing out all the pos­si­ble prob­lems and then solv­ing them and then mak­ing the art. Rather, it is in the act of mak­ing that you fig­ure out the prob­lems, and solve them, too — or, even bet­ter, fig­ure out how to use them.

How to do it? You have to try not to get too loose, or too tight, either. Not too con­fi­dent, and not too doubt­ing. You have to pay atten­tion to and hon­or what is excit­ing you, and also know when to let it go, if it’s some lit­tle thing that’s not help­ing the larg­er sto­ry you want to tell. You wait for the writ­ing to begin to talk back you, and you lis­ten to what it has to say. You try to be hon­est with your­self about how a line is going to work for you read­ers, or not, and to let that hon­esty guide you.

All of this is eas­i­er said than done. There are days of frus­tra­tions and self-doubt and a lot of revi­sions and work — but writ­ing is a way of think­ing, a way of fig­ur­ing things out, and in the gen­uine work of writ­ing and rewrit­ing (and rewrit­ing) you will begin to under­stand your true pri­or­i­ties and hopes for your writ­ing. And ulti­mate­ly it is that hard work, and where it takes you, that makes writ­ing reward­ing. The dif­fi­cult days will get you to the good days, and on the good days you will feel the plea­sure of sort­ing, arrang­ing, pri­or­i­tiz­ing, clar­i­fy­ing, of find­ing the rhythm and music of the piece, of know­ing how to arrange its moments of excite­ment and its moments of rest and tran­si­tion, or the plea­sure of feel­ing a word, a thought, a feel­ing, click into place. And on the very good days there is a joy­ful and earned sense of active play. The more you do it, the more nat­ur­al it will feel. Writ­ing is a mus­cle you can develop.

One oth­er impor­tant thing to men­tion. As I work, if I’m lucky, I’m shar­ing what I’m writ­ing and all the ques­tions and doubts it is rais­ing with a good edi­tor. I used to think an edi­tor was some­one who told you what you couldn’t say and point­ed out your trou­ble with gram­mar. From my great first edi­tor, Dick Jack­son, with whom Avi also worked, I learned that an edi­tor, a good one, is some­one who sees what you are try­ing to say and tries to help you say it. Good edi­tors make good sug­ges­tions, to be sure, but even more help­ful­ly than that they ask good ques­tions. You might have a friend kind enough to do some­thing like that for you, to look at your writ­ing and to talk with you, hon­est­ly but gen­tly (gen­tly!), about how they think it is work­ing. You won’t have to agree with them, of course, but even if you don’t you will find it help­ful to think about why not.

Often the last parts of the sto­ry I fin­ish, the parts I am rewrit­ing to the very end, are the begin­ning and the end­ing. Back to the arch­i­pel­ago: I want to think about how to get you into it, and then how to get you out of it, hope­ful­ly hap­py that you’ve vis­it­ed. There should be a sense of entrance and invi­ta­tion and maybe even provo­ca­tion at the start. The open­ing “should shine like a flash­light down through the piece,” said writer John McPhee. About end­ings Uri Shule­vitz writes, in his excel­lent book Writ­ing with Pic­tures, “The answers at the end must not frus­trate the ques­tions at the begin­ning. The end must be the direct out­come of the begin­ning; no sub­sti­tute answers will do.” And yet some enlarge­ment of the story’s seem­ing themes and of our under­stand­ing should occur between the begin­ning of the book and the end, too, Shule­vitz says: “A good end­ing should add focus and sig­nif­i­cance to the unfold­ing that has pre­ced­ed.” I have tried for some of this sense of enlarge­ment in my books. Light­ship, for instance, begins as a sto­ry of a ship and dai­ly process­es, but becomes also, I hope, a trib­ute to duty and help­ing oth­ers (“Oth­er ships sail home safe… because the light­ship holds her place.”). In Moon­shot what begins as tale of a tech­no­log­i­cal feat and adven­ture becomes a reflec­tion on our place in the uni­verse. In Loco­mo­tive, a trip on a col­or­ful, roar­ing machine becomes a fam­i­ly reunion. For all its excite­ment and stim­u­la­tion, this is the high­est and hap­pi­est pur­pose of trav­el: to get us to the peo­ple we love, and who love us, too.