Writing is like having this big box full of moths, and in amongst the moths are trapped several butterflies. Every time you have an idea, the box opens and out fly a thousand or so moths. Your job is to weave in and out of them with a small net, trying to catch the few butterflies sweeping and spiralling amongst the bedlam. To do so takes incredible nimbleness, dexterity and judgement; after all, it's sometimes quite difficult to tell what's a moth and what's a butterfly.
Even if you do manage to snare yourself a butterfly, you then have to pin it down, and quite a few can slip away and escape through accident or carelessness. And even then, even if you succeed in pinning your butterfly down, you've killed it. You've captured its beauty, ensnared it to paper, but you've taken away its motion, its grace, in many ways the things that made it beautiful to begin with.
The true art of writing, and something I don't think I shall ever accomplish, is being able to breath life back into dead butterflies. Even here, in this very idea, something that in its inception was so pure and perfect has, through the wrong turn of phrase here and there, through the odd clunky phrase, through the regrettable choice of word, become sullied and still; a dead butterfly upon a lifeless page.
