"The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality"
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There is a sly modesty in Moody calling it “messing around,” as if the labor of shaping paragraphs were closer to tinkering in a garage than chiseling marble. That casual phrasing is the first tell: he’s deflating the romance of authorship even as he admits to a kind of compulsion. “Trying to make really good prose” sounds plainspoken, almost sheepish, but it smuggles in a high standard and a private pressure. He’s not describing inspiration; he’s describing a temperament that can’t leave language alone.
The key move is “hardwired into my personality.” Moody frames craft not as a professional habit but as a neurological destiny. It’s a subtle self-portrait of the novelist as someone whose attention naturally snags on cadence, syntax, the emotional micro-physics of a sentence. That’s also an alibi: if revision looks obsessive, it’s because it is. The subtext is that writing isn’t a job you clock into; it’s an orientation toward the world, a way of processing experience by reorganizing it into paragraphs that finally click.
Contextually, this reads like an answer to the perennial demand that writers be fountains of story or hot takes. Moody points instead to the less glamorous engine room: revision, fussing, the slow pursuit of “really good” rather than merely publishable. In an era that rewards speed, his claim is quietly resistant. The personality is the process; the process is the point.
The key move is “hardwired into my personality.” Moody frames craft not as a professional habit but as a neurological destiny. It’s a subtle self-portrait of the novelist as someone whose attention naturally snags on cadence, syntax, the emotional micro-physics of a sentence. That’s also an alibi: if revision looks obsessive, it’s because it is. The subtext is that writing isn’t a job you clock into; it’s an orientation toward the world, a way of processing experience by reorganizing it into paragraphs that finally click.
Contextually, this reads like an answer to the perennial demand that writers be fountains of story or hot takes. Moody points instead to the less glamorous engine room: revision, fussing, the slow pursuit of “really good” rather than merely publishable. In an era that rewards speed, his claim is quietly resistant. The personality is the process; the process is the point.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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