It’s very strange, living with a book‌—‌not only during the writing but long after, when you begin to find out what you wrote, and have to come to terms with it. I began writing The Last Unicorn in the summer of 1962, gave it up at about 85 pages, bored and uninventive; made the journey that became I See By My Outfit; and finally got back to work on that unicorn story. One chapter was salvaged from that bad start, and one song.

I made it up as I went along, trying‌—‌as much as I ever told myself what I was doing‌—‌to keep my options open as long as possible; deliberately painting myself into corners, laying groundwork for developments that might or might not develop, as the story and its people felt like it. When I felt like writing a little song, or just rhyming something‌—‌and those songs are the little love affairs for me, the raisins in the cookie‌—‌I wrote a song; and when I knew that it was time for someone to join the story, that it couldn’t go any further until a new character came on the scene, I waited, gambling that it would be the right somebody who showed. Schmendrick the Magician wandered into the tale out of bedtime stories I used to tell my eldest daughter; and I’ve had a favorite painting of unicorns and bulls since I was 15. The cat is one of ours. I’m not sure where the other people and beings in the tale came from, though I make my guesses. I had to wait a long time for King Haggard.

For all that spontaneity, the truth is that The Last Unicorn was a grubby, sweaty, joyless job of work, except now and then. It was squeezed and twisted out of an imagination that never felt as though it had very much to give. I went through black cycles of depression and self-disgust, lightened by occasional periods when I felt that the book had been a bad idea in the first place, and at least it wasn’t as though I was messing up something pretty. But most of the time I knew that the unicorn, Schmendrick, Lír, Molly Grue, and all the rest were alive, and that I was failing them. I don’t know for sure that that’s the worst feeling an author can have, being still new to the trade. But it’s the worst one I know so far.

The writing of fantasy is best left to those who have nothing better to do, as is indicated by the fairy tales of otherwise gifted writers like Robert Graves and John Ciardi. It isn’t so much the difficulty of doing it right, without falling off the tightrope into the cold pits of allegory or mindless whimsy‌—‌the weary thing is that even if you bring it off, all you’ve done is write a fantasy, and so what? Life is dangerous, and escapism has become a dirty word. I feel the same way, being a child of my own critical times. I’d write the other stuff, the real books, if I could. Plenty nitty-gritty. If I could.