“Artistic creation is a voyage into the unknown. In our own eyes, we are off the map. The excitement of potential discovery is accompanied by anxiety, despair, caution, perhaps, perhaps boldness, and, always, the risk of failure. Failure can take the form of our becoming hopelessly lost, or pointlessly lost, or nor not finding what we came for (though that last is sometimes happily accompagnied by the discovery of something we didn’t anticpate, couldn’t even imagine before we found it). We strike out for what we believe to be uncharted waters, only to find ourselves sailing in someone else’s bathtub. Those are the days it seems there is nothing new to discover but the limitations of our own experience and understanding.”
taken from Maps of the Imagination: The writer as cartographer, by Peter Turchi