Duende Notes

Why write? For the mind to be so fiercely occupied. In Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner wrote (he died in 1982) that a writer's goal was to create a "vivid and continuous dream." To write is to leave home and occupy for the time the dream persists some fearsomely foreign place as someone else—maybe dreaming the life we are living. To be able to write such a world into being beats even reading a good book. There is more life inventing it so well that it becomes a dream to wake up to.