Arrange.

There’s a limit to one’s resourcefulness, but how do you know the limit? You have to push out and not do anything you’ve ever done before. It comes to that. The notion of change in fiction is that a train has to stay on its tracks, and animals, even more than we, are creatures of specific habits, which is why, once you learn their habits, they are quite easy to hunt. But a man can stop his car, get out; he can dive in a lake and swim across, and then climb a tree. So don’t tell me you can’t change your fiction. Habit is what destroys art. I’ve always been struck by those Cheyenne who did everything backwards when they were bored. There’s a longing, a craving to know more than we get to know, sort of a Faustian notion that you want a lot of interesting things to occur before you die; and it strikes you that rather than wait around for them to occur, you’re going to have to arrange most of them.

Jim Harrison