Only at that moment did I experience a sort of virginal amazement at the fact that a book isn’t there until you write it. If I don’t make the girl appear, she doesn’t appear. If I don’t make her think, keep quiet, say something now and then, meet this or that person, then she doesn’t think, doesn’t keep quiet, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t meet anyone. Then there’s no girl, and no story.

And yet the story wasn’t even there in my head yet either, at least not in the sense that I could simply write it down.

Yes, there is a field there that is beckoning (indeed, many important scenes in the theater take place in an “open field”), but the story isn’t there yet. Woyzeck hunts for mushrooms at night in an open field, it’s more or less like that. So I make my way across the field, blind and seeing at the same time. Groping would probably be a better way to express it, the way that I try to conjure up something that isn’t even there yet, to make it materialize out of a blind spot; my search leads me out, that is, I lead myself — but the reverse is also true, as it is in every search, I’m led by the thing I’m searching for. So it’s a state in between the knowledge that something is there and the ignorance of what that something is. This, I think, is what makes the work of writing so much like love, makes it exert a pull on us like love. By the way, this process of groping is also the reason that sentences which may be false in their own right can still be true, because the field that I make my way across as I write can only be partly comprehended by the understanding.