If it was an airplane, the airplane that I was bolting together was a poor shadow of the one I felt obscurely within me. It wasn't so much that I could imagine that ideal airplane. If I had been able to imagine it, I could have built it. No, it was more an intuition, a felt sense of some more complex, intricate, mysterious, and beautiful airplane hiding within the clunky one taking shape before me on the living room rug. This experience has been constant in my life.
Writing is like that.
I get a dim obscure sense of what I want to write, I nurse it and nourish it in the darkness until one day I set out to write it. And what I write might be good enough, but it isn't as glorious as that piece that teased me from the dim recesses of revery and possibility and dream. The labels on the box and the big pieces intrigued me more and more. Wherever that was, I wanted to be there. We lived in New Hampshire and that's the only place on earth that I knew.