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Do you know where you are going? I asked yesterday, and I loved the diversity of responses—the absolutely and the never, the somewhere in between.

I live my life lost, I said, and what I meant by that is this: When writing any story I am, from the very start, grounded in place. I am grounded in voice and in mood and in an elixired idea, and soon—perhaps thirty pages in—I have a general feel for structure.

And yet and nonetheless I feel strange, off kilter, lost because at first and for a very long time, things happen, and I'm not quite sure why. A character will speak, insist, remember, and I cannot claim to know just what her motivations are.

So I let her loose. I let her dwell or skirt or fear or flashback, and in all of this I am coming to understand just who she has the possibility of being. Half of it will be jettisoned later, maybe more. The apparent meaning of words will shift. A sliver of something will become a key, recurrent theme, and I simply yield to it. Over and again I write these books, until they let me into themselves.

This is not economical writing, but it is writing toward knowing, toward finally finding out. It is the antithesis, as I have written previously in this blog, of Mr. Irving's write-the-last-sentence-first. I don't suggest my process as right or wrong. It is only that: my process.