Roger Cohen wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times about Israel a couple of 
weeks ago. He began by quoting a novelist. The quote is perhaps the best commentary I’ve seen on the process of writing. He said:
“(Writing) is like reconstructing the whole of Paris from Lego bricks. It’s about three-quarters-of-a-million small decisions. It’s not about who will live and who will die and who will go to bed with whom. Those are the easy ones. It’s about choosing adjectives and adverbs and punctuation. These are molecular decisions that you have to take and nobody will appreciate, for the same reason that nobody ever pays attention to a single note in a symphony in a concert hall, except when the note is false. So you have to work very hard in order for your readers not to note a single false note. That is the business of three-quarters-of-a-million decisions.”
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Author: John Rogers
I have thought of myself as a writer for most of my adult life. In 2011, I became a fiction writer full time. I studied creative writing as an English major in college. Then came family and career. I worked in finance and biotech and did a wonderful stint in Vienna. Now, I have the opportunity to use those experiences as the substrate for my stories. My first novel takes on the world of Big Data and the very timely issue of cyber war. The second uses the manipulation of financial derivatives as impetus for attempted murder during a trip from Vienna to Budapest on the Danube.
I have taken writing instruction at the Cape Cod Writers Conference and from The Loft in Minneapolis. I am finding writers’ groups to be very helpful as concept editors, as well as practical advice from the published authors. I am in three such groups. I have taken writing instruction at the Cape Cod Writers Conference and from The Loft in Minneapolis.
View all posts by John Rogers
weeks ago. He began by quoting a novelist. The quote is perhaps the best commentary I’ve seen on the process of writing. He said:
That’s a good one. Though it might not be as long, it is also true for a song.
Absolutely. More so. A song (or a poem), it seems to me, is like being allowed only a few hundred lego bricks and being challenged to put them together such that the viewer sees the Eiffel Tower.