It wasn’t always gray, but that’s what I remember: the rags of an English winter, strewn across the sky; clouds and more clouds, endless, gloomy; rain hitting the sidewalk outside.
I was a prisoner of the weather, and of myself: of day after day at the typewriter, with nothing to show for it; of my longing to be a writer, a real writer, though the truth — dark and cheerless as the English sky — was that I had no idea what that meant.
I knew what it meant to be a reporter, faithful to the facts. As a reporter, I learned to weave a net of questions, and cast it, and haul in my wriggling catch: facts, and more facts; the who, what, why, where, and when of a story. But the contests and compromises of the great were no longer interesting. I’d discovered a more compelling story: the changes happening in me.
