Interesting comments about writing from word-master John Fowles:
In every way except that of mere publishing date, The Magus is a first novel. I began writing it in the early 1950s, and both narrative and mood went through countless transformations. […] But I had no coherent idea of where I was going, in life as in the book. A more objective side of me did not then believe I should ever become a publishable writer; a subjective one could not abandon the myth it was trying, clumsily and laboriously, to bring into the world; and my strongest memory is of constantly having to abandon drafts because of an inability to describe what I wanted. Both technique and that bizarre face of the imagination that seems to be more like a failure to remember the already existent than what it really is – a failure to evoke the non-existent – kept me miserably aground. Yet when the success of The Collector in 1963 gave me some literary confidence, it was this endlessly tortured and recast cripple that demanded precedence over various other novels I had attempted in the 1950s. […]
I should add that in revising the text I have not attempted to answer the many justified criticisms of excess, over-complexity, artificiality and the rest that the book received from the more sternly adult reviewers on its first appearance. I now know the generation whose mind it most attracts, and that must substantially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent. My only plea is that all artists have to range the full extent of their lives freely. The rest of the world can censor and bury their private past. We cannot, and so have to remain ever green till the day we die… callow-green in the hope of becoming fertile-green.