Watching.

When night begins falling, the way you see things is not to look on directly but to focus at some spot just beside them. That, Harrison knows, is the proper place for the writer: off to the side, watching. "It's never the conclusions, it's the story, the experience." Again and again, book after book, year after year, one struggles to keep that focus, to strip insulation off the last half-inch or so of experience's wires to make connections, to tell the story as best one is able.

It's that simple, that impossible.

Read the rest here.

I love this, too ... The discovery of garlic seemed an important aspect of my development as an artist, equal to that of figuring out that red wine was better for the imagination than beer.