Engineering in the Bookshop

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, quote from the book:

"When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else." 

Read it Yourself in the Bookshop

"It's inevitably the case that whatever idea impels you to write a novel turns out to appear in the book as an afterthought." - Douglas Adams