The Essence

For me, writing ressembles making a sauce - a tomato sauce. You begin by putting in all the ingredients but then, when you taste the sauce, it's bland and watery. So you have to boil off a lot of the liquid. That's what you have to do with the writing as well. You have to boil it down again and again. What you're trying to do is to get down to the essence of the thing. You want to finish up with something viscous and full of flavour. You want to lose everything that isn't absolutely necessary to the taste of the sauce. It can take a long time to make this kind of sauce.