“A writer far more experienced than I once said to me something like, ‘You’ve got to bushwhack past the first million or so rotten words to get at the good stuff.’ That was twenty years ago. Since then I’ve bushwhacked my way through three million words—yet with the assumption that the formula is infinitely renewable. Each time I sit down to write I approach my task in that spirit: that of bushwhacking toward a clearing where a masterpiece waits.”
—Peter Selgin, author of Confessions of a Left-Handed Man (University of Iowa Press)