The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it,

But something happens to them as they grow up; they become aware of the difference between what they can do and what accomplished artists can do; they realise that their pictures look clumsy, ill-coordinated, naïve, in a word childish; and they lose the confidence to work as freely as they used to. A sort of cramp seizes their hands. They say, ‘Oh,

I still have to look after it. I still have to protect it from interference while it becomes sure of itself and settles on the form it wants.

And I want to stress again that the business of the storyteller is with the story-line, with the path. You can make your story-wood, your invented world, as rich and full as you like, but be very, very careful not to be tempted off the path.

SOMETIMES, BY CHANCE OR FATE OR THE WORKINGS OF AN INSCRUTABLE Providence, we meet exactly the right work of art at exactly the right time to have the maximum impact on us.

and then found myself completely unable to proceed. I felt hypnotised into immobility.

Each novel or story is a path (because it’s linear, because it begins on page one and goes on steadily through all the pages in the usual order until it gets to the end) that goes through a wood. The wood is the world in which the characters live and have their being; it’s the realm of all the things that could possibly happen to them; it’s the

we who tell stories should be modest about the job, and not assume that just because the reader is interested in the story, they’re interested in who’s telling it.

can tell me something useful). So the wood, or the forest, is the sum of all possibilities, and, as I have mentioned elsewhere, I found a nicely scientific-sounding term for it in a book about elementary physics. The term is phase space.