Making It Up

From Gail Caldwell's Boston Globe review of Penelope Lively's "Making It Up;"

"Any writer who shoves around words all day will tell you that order's the thing: All nouns and verbs must line up under the author's steely gaze, compliant as schoolchildren in a fire drill. Otherwise, where's the joy? One writes to imposte the ego's scaffolding upon the messy business of life, and what chaos the ordinary life presents! Even the most rigorously truth-bound writers will bend and rearrange the facts, if only by where they choose to put them. Fiction writers, a wilder and sneakier bunch, get to sort through their rummage-sale findings and use them willy nilly . . . having elected to serve this god of imagination, fiction writers must be ruthless in the hunt--they haul their kill into the cave and hope it will help to feed the beast."