The work on the sentence itself, the words, really obeys the sensation, the feeling: "that's it" or "that's not it". I believe that when I write, I don't see the words, I see things. Which can be very fleeting, abstract, feelings, or on the contrary concrete, scenes, images of memory. The words come without me looking for them or on the contrary require extreme tension, not an effort, a tension, to be exactly adjusted to the mental representation.

If I had a definition of what writing is, it would be this: discovering through writing what it is impossible to discover by any other means. - Annie Ernaux