Magellan's Log: Iris Murdoch: At It

We get occasional glimpses behind Murdoch’s own Chinese screen:

"Was the poem any good? Muriel wondered. Could one really tell with one’s own stuff? She was well aware of that golden glow of ideal intention which, for the artist, covers so often the achieved reality of his own art so that it is hard to see the contours of what he has done amid the shimmering lights of what he might have done. Sometimes she felt that her work was good, and felt, what was perhaps even more important, that she was on the road, that she had got a technique and knew how to improve. She was no longer a scribbler down of random inspirations. She knew now how to work, steadily and for hours on end, like a carpenter or a shoemaker. She could dissolve and reassemble her best felicities without a craven fear of spoiling them. She could even a little compel and invite those dark regions out of which the images drifted like miraculous kites."
--The Time of the Angels.