That is the note I wrote to myself at the head of my first work-page.

After this comes much labor to construct a set of situations that will propel my characters from one encounter to the next; six weeks of five-hour-a-day labor later, I have finished a reasonable second draft. Picking it up from the kitchen table where I do most of my work, a day or so later, I notice—and for the first time!—that while each man has his encounter with every other man, and while each man has an encounter with every woman, somehow I have neglected, in express opposition to my sated form, to have any encounters among any of the women characters at all! Anyone with a sense of symmetry can feel the tale drastically list; and yet through two drafts the idea of fixing a situation so that two women might have to talk to one another never even occurred to me! Indeed, as I look again, I realize that there is one very definite non-encounter between two of the women: one refuses to speak to another because of mistaken jealousy over one of the men. At this point, the only way to return to the form is to wrench apart all the elements of the story—plot, themes, motivations—and build these missing encounters back in. On more than one occasion I have wrenched, and, at least in terms of my own satisfaction, found it well worth it.

The more distressing point is that I do not think I was any less aware of this problem twelve years ago when I started writing than I am today. My twentieth and twenty-first years were dominated by hundreds of discussions with women writers, housewives, women psychologists, and the men around them, on the position of women in society and literature. These are the points that were made then: why can neither male nor female writers show women in the psychological richness that they show men (or with the psychological generosity they show to their male characters); why can they not show the social and economic realities that hold their women to the world of their fictions; and why can they not show women’s relations with one another, involved and fruitful. And these are the place I still find my own fictions failing at age thirty-one. The mark of the failure is usually some blatant violation of a perfectly obvious aesthetic symmetry—thankfully! I have become so numbed by the world I live in, were it not for this over-determined relation between aesthetics and ethics, I sometimes think I would not even be able to recognize these inequities at all, even critically, much less have a hope of recognizing them from the more complicated position inside the creative, story-making process.

But when I speak of the inequity of literary artifice, the above examples only define the pernicious category. Again and again, over twelve years of writing, when my intentions have been the most conscientiously egalitarian, my initial results have been sabotaged by them. Looking at it objectively, it seems to have all the earmarks of a compulsive neurosis; and it is not in the least heartening that this particular neurosis seems endemic to almost all novelists in the West. What we are dealing with, here, are those fine elements of language and sensibility which the novelist uses to amass the life of the book. To see them so insidiously outside control as soon as the material wants to veer from the well-worn groove is terrifying. All writers who have confronted this problem must have felt the pressure on the vein, the tightening around the throat, the heart itself crushed, their lives as novelists in danger. But, somehow, during the uncritical years of reading, when the novel was weaving its initial enchantment around us, it also managed to scribe out on the base materia of recognition memory the pattern which the most energetic or considered efforts seem unable to erase and still leave a narrative recognizable to us, who have been so seduced, as fiction.