The Pulitzer Prize winning author Eudora Welty wrote this about the craft

of a novel: “The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists,

not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished

work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The

essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is

not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never

was before and will not be again.”