Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Ondaatje

Ondaatje is quietly demystifying the “inspiration” myth by admitting that discovery comes first, craft second. The line stages writing not as a single blaze of genius but as a two-phase operation: an exploratory drift where the story reveals itself, followed by a cooler, almost surgical pass where meaning is engineered. He’s giving you the magician’s method without ruining the trick: the emotional truth arrives in the messy draft; the inevitability arrives later.

The key phrase is “much later,” which is both practical advice and an aesthetic stance. Ondaatje’s work often feels like it’s moving by intuition - lyric, fragmentary, attentive to memory’s gaps - but here he points out how deliberately that sensation can be built. “Set up a clue” is a tell: he’s acknowledging reader psychology. We want to believe we’re uncovering a world, not being led by the lapel. So he delays the visible machinery until the story has its own internal weather, then retrofits the foreshadowing that makes the final version feel fated rather than patched.

Subtextually, he’s defending revision as an ethical act: not falsifying the discovery, but honoring it by arranging it so the reader can experience that same discovery at speed. In an era that fetishizes rawness - the unfiltered draft, the “authentic” first take - Ondaatje stakes a calmer claim: authenticity isn’t the absence of editing; it’s the editor’s restraint, arriving after the story has already told you what it wants.