![]() But I'm too interested in many other things. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. After the second or third draft it goes into the computer, so I don't retype the whole manuscript anymore, but continue to revise by hand on a succession of hard-copy drafts from the computer. Since then there is a computer in my life. ![]() And keep on retyping it, each time making corrections both by hand and directly on the typewriter, until I don't see how to make it any better. Then I type it up and scrawl all over that. I write with a felt-tip pen, or sometimes a pencil, on yellow or white legal pads, that fetish of American writers. A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper. If I get sick of it, I have places I can go. In consequence, the members of my household never pay the slightest attention to my being a writing man-they make all the noise and fuss they want to. My wife, thank God, has never been protective of me, as, I am told, the wives of some writers are. A girl pushing a carpet sweeper under my typewriter table has never annoyed me particularly, nor has it taken my mind off my work, unless the girl was unusually pretty or unusually clumsy. But it's a bright, cheerful room, and I often use it as a room to write in, despite the carnival that is going on all around me. My house has a living room that is at the core of everything that goes on: it is a passageway to the cellar, to the kitchen, to the closet where the phone lives. On the other hand, I'm able to work fairly well among ordinary distractions. I haven't that kind of attentiveness, and I wouldn't like it at all. I never listen to music when I'm working. White, in the same fantastic interview that gave us his timeless insight on the role and responsibility of the writer, notes his relationship with sound and ends on a note echoing Tchaikovsky on work ethic: In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it. That's one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. If I don't have the hour, and start the next day with just some bad pages and nowhere to go, I'm in low spirits. When I'm really working I don't like to go out or have anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening notes. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. I can't do it late in the afternoon because I'm too close to it. I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I've done that day.
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