Writing: what goes on in a kebab shop

Novelist Justin Cartwright writes in the Guardian about writerly inspiration: The other day an Argentinian woman asked me how I get my inspiration. The implication of the question was that basically all you need to write a book is some inspiration, by which she meant a marketable idea. It was impossible to say that actually the process of writing a book is similar to what goes on in a kebab shop: you carve bits of yourself away and present them in envelopes of pitta. The lettuce and the tomato and the hot sauce are style. This simile is—clearly—not going very far, but the point is that writing is not about a Great Idea which writes itself. Writing is, as Philip Roth put it, self mining.