I never do write what I say I am going to

Maud Newton posts selections from the Hermione Lee biography of Edith Wharton, focusing especially on the writing process:

When Wharton talked in old age about her writing methods, she said (as many novelists do) that her characters “arrived,” “coming seemingly from nowhere,” complete with their names. They “then began to speak within me with their own voices.” It sounds from this as though she subscribes to the idea of the writer as a kind of unconscious medium, through which the narrative flows onto the page. But she also says, firmly, that her characters never “walk away with the subject”: she knows “from the first exactly what is going to happen to every one of them.” So she describes a double operation (which parallels the mixture of cool analysis and deep emotion in her fiction). The process of writing “takes place in some secret region on the sheer edge of consciousness” but “is always illuminated by the full light of my critical attention.”