I recently read Crescent, a novel by Laurie Devine, about the lives of four women in Beirut in the second half of the last century. It was a whirlwind, all 880 pages of it. The throbbing assault of young love, the catharsis believers experience during prayer, the fear and panic of aerial bombardment, the unbearable pain of losing one’s child, each and all of these scenes grab the reader, twist him around, and don’t let him go. Boy, this woman can write! She knows her subject intimately, and her prose seems to be cascading easily onto the page.

I wish I could write like that. When I write, I struggle. I hesitate, carefully choosing my words. One word after the other, I slowly progress. What I want to say doesn’t pour out of me. It dribbles, it drops onto the page. If I feel good about my work, I pretend I’m sculpting with words. I imagine myself yielding a chisel, like the sculptor, each delicate strike revealing a little more of the treasure hidden inside my block of marble. Other times, my words are mud bricks, and the edifice I’m constructing crumbles.

Here is what Kurt Vonnegut said about this subject: “Tellers of stories with ink or paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crancum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done, they’re done. I’m a basher. Most men are bashers, and most women are swoopers.”

I’m a basher, too.