Lovely review by Kate Saunders of Intuition in the Sunday Times (April 29, 2009).

Set in a cancer research lab in Boston – not particularly promising – this
tale is wonderfully written and as compulsive as Grisham. The co-directors
of the lab are Marion Mendelssohn, rigorous and pragmatic, and Sandy Glass,
a successful doctor ravenous for publicity. Their army of badly paid
scientists are under constant pressure to produce results, and there is
great excitement when Cliff Bannaker’s experiments with mice appear to
signal a breakthrough. But his girlfriend suspects that his findings are
fraudulent and, suddenly, all the seething jealousies in the building are
exposed. A riveting novel, uncomfortably relevant.

I have just spent the morning rewriting my novel’s outline. 

People always ask me–do you outline everything first?  Do you know how your book is going to end?

Yes and no.  I outline extensively and then I rewrite the outline as I go.  I’ll be writing along at a pretty fast clip, and suddenly I’ll hit a speed bump and nothing works.  I don’t know what to do.  Usually when that happens, there is a problem with my outline, so I go back and rewrite the outline, and then, with my new road map, I pick myself up, dust myself off and proceed, gingerly, on my way.

Why gingerly?  Well, these enormous changes are a bit disconcerting, especially when they continue right up to the end of the book.  Sometimes they require tracking back to establish new plot lines earlier.  Not this time, fortunately.  Just new thinking as I write my way forward.

Slowly, slowly, slowly. I’m inching along just when I want to gallop to the end!

This is what it’s like to return to a long novel after an enforced break:

Monday:  spent the whole day rereading previous scenes and trying to remember what my book was about.

Tuesday: sat and stared and wrote exactly two paragraphs

Wednesday: wrote five pages

Thursday: wrote about six pages and finished the chapter

Friday: revised

Tuesday was the worst.  Painful, discouraging.  Imagine returning to running after no exercise at all.  Once you ran five miles, and now you can’t even make it around the block.  That’s what it was like.  I had no idea what I was doing.

So what changed between Tuesday and Wednesday?  I added an umbrella to the scene I was writing.  Suddenly among all those characters standing around and waiting in the rain, one carried an umbrella–and with that umbrella the whole chapter fell into place.  Because of course this guy would carry an umbrella at that moment, and of course, that umbrella would turn into a weapon later on.  Didn’t Chekhov say you can’t have an umbrella without shooting it off?

The imagination is a strange and delicate thing.  And I’m not taking any more breaks from my book!  Not until the whole thing is done.

Returning to a novel after two weeks off is painful.  I’ve spent the whole morning rereading scenes I’ve already written, reviewing notes, and adding to my lengthening To Do list for revisions.  It’s hard to imagine returning to speed again as I was in, say March.  It’s going ot take days and weeks.

Athletes get stiff, sore, and winded when they return to play after time off.  Musicians feel rusty when they don’t keep their hand in.  Novelists are no different.   I feel a bit frantic, as though I’ve dropped multiple stitches and I’m trying to catch them all up again.

I’m down in Nashville with my family for Passover.  How lush and green.  The trees are blooming, pink and lavender, rows and rows of deep purple irises flower in the gardens, the lawns are thick and velvety.  Boston won’t look like this until the end of May.  Spring comes early and lasts longer here.  Those irises!  I hear they are the state flower of Tennessee.  In Boston they seem to bloom for about four days, but in Nashville they look as though they like to open and stay.

This always happens to me.  Just as I am about to write the climactic scenes of my book, it’s Passover!  Now I come to a screeching stop. 

Well, these interruptions always make me more motivated once they’re over.  That’s what I tell myself, anyway.  I do appreciate the time for contemplation.

Thoreau set up house at Walden Pond.  Antoine Saint de Exupery flew over the desert.  Johnson journeyed to the Hebrides.  And I have Passover–a journey without a journey.  Equally lovely, equally profound.  `

Intuition has had some nice press in England.

A lovely review in The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/28/intuition-allegra-goodman-review

And an article about work in the novel:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/mar/30/work-novels-fiction-flanders?commentpage=1