Preface - Those Extraordinary Twins - Mark Twain

I think it was John Dickson Carr, under one pseudonym or another, who bragged that some books came into his head essentially ready-made and only took a matter of days to write down. (How much time the publisher's editors spent whipping it into final shape after that never really got mentioned, as I remember...)

And I'm sure that happens sometimes, particularly with authors who have a few books under their belt and have some momentum built up.

And, for the record, I happen to like some of Mr. Carr's rapidly-written wonders, particularly some of the Carter Dickson ones, especially the Sir Henry Merrivale ones. (He's such a big, blustering, old softie, he is.)

But, for most authors of fiction, most of the time, I suspect the process is less like the legendary hack model and much more like what Mark Twain describes in the preface to Those Extraordinary Twins, as reprinted over at http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words:

A MAN who is born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality. He knows these people, he knows the selected locality, and he trusts that he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No—that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale; a very little tale; a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.

And I have noticed another thing: that as the short tale grows into the long tale, the original intention (or motif) is apt to get abolished and find itself superseded by a quite different one. It was so in the case of a magazine sketch which I once started to write—a funny and fantastic sketch about a prince and a pauper; it presently assumed a grave cast of its own accord, and in that new shape spread itself out into a book. Much the same thing happened with “Pudd’nhead Wilson.” I had a sufficiently hard time with that tale, because it changed itself from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it—a most embarrassing circumstance. But what was a great deal worse was, that it was not one story, but two stories tangled together; and they obstructed and interrupted each other at every turn and created no end of confusion and annoyance. I could not offer the book for publication, for I was afraid it would unseat the reader’s reason. I did not know what was the matter with it, for I had not noticed, as yet, that it was two stories in one. It took me months to make that discovery. I carried the manuscript back and forth across the Atlantic two or three times, and read it and studied over it on shipboard; and at last I saw where the difficulty lay. I had no further trouble. I pulled one of the stories out by the roots, and left the other one—a kind of literary Cæsarean operation...