I love sentences. This is why I am a writer. I love to make sentences. I even love punctuation. I love all this stuff that we are given, this little handful of equipment and raw materials. So, it is a joyous expression when you see something come together at last. Then the next day you look at it and you realize that you haven't done it at all. Then you do it again. It is in the rewriting where I find the exhilarating part of the whole enterprise. The writing itself, the first draft, the sort of hacking at the stone wall, seems to me such a difficult piece of work that it is hard to see where pleasure comes in this process. But once it is on the page and you start moving it around, changing words, moving sentences - so you get closer and closer to what you really want to say, to what you really mean. You never get it right, and I think you have to accept that as writer, that what we call “the golden book in our head” is not going to make it to the page completely. But we keep getting closer, and I find this exhilarating.

-- Carol Shields, in an interview for The Academy of Achievement in 1998