"Homework"

"I don’t begin a novel with a shopping list. The novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It’s like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn’t a violin. That’s what I do when I’m writing, except somehow I’m simultaneously generating the wood as I’m carving it.

"E.M. Forster’s idea has always stuck with me – that a writer who’s fully in control of the characters hasn’t even started to do the work. …. The sort of narratives I don’t trust, as a reader, smell of homework."

-- William Gibson, Paris Review 197