Someone asked me how I’d describe the work of writing a novel. I had no idea.

And then I came up with this:

Imagine you have two perfect cubes of granite you can move only with your mind. You have to turn them into a pair of perfect spheres by spinning them rapidly and grazing them against one another so that they are abraded into shape. You may not put them down until the job is done.

Now, try holding the image in your head and working through what you’d have to do.

Does that make sense?