ques-

People often ask me if I discipline myself to write, if I work a

certain number of hours a day on a schedule. They ask this

tion with envy in their voices and awe on their faces and a sense

of alienation all over them, as if they were addressing an armored

tank or a talking giraffe or Niagara Falls. We want to believe that

5 other people are natural wonders; it gets us off the hook.

Now, it happens that when I wrote my first book of prose',

I worked an hour or two a day for a while, and then in the last

two months, I got excited and worked very hard, for many hours

a day. People can lift cars when they want to. People can recite

What’s the main idea?