Goodreads asked Tamim Ansary:

What’s the best thing about being a writer?

Tamim Ansary In my experience, writing is mostly like trying to bring a half-remembered dream into focus. You can feel something there , just outside your conscious awareness, but you can't see it until you've clothed it with words. But when you reach for it with words, it dissipates. At the end of a day, typically, you've got a whole bunch of words to sift through and nope: whatever you were fishing for, it isn't quite there. But it's almost there. You can feel it, you just can't see it. Every part of the process is like that: take structural revision, for example... throwing away good stuff because it doesn't fit...rummaging for the mot juste that doesn't seem to exist. So: the best part about being a writer? Those moments of closure along the way, That aha!-got it-experience. I'd compare it to fishing if I'd ever succeeded in catching a fish. And what's especially wonderful is that euphoric sense of closure you get at the very end if you're lucky: "Wow, that's so exactly what I wanted to say that now at last I can let it go." That experience is SO great that you want it again, sou find yourself back at your keyboard, because there's this other idea tickling at your brain, you don't know quite know what it is, it's lurking just out there in the darkness, if you could just wrap a few words around it you'd be able to drag it into the light and see if it's worth pursuing...

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