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CB: You are obliged to face isolation ��� that���s the test, a marvelous test. Can you go in a room, face a blank sheet of paper, and come up with something that���s worth the sacrifice? NM: When one���s a young writer there���s that awful feeling that life is going by and you���re not getting enough experience for your future writing. It���s hard to be a young writer and a monk. It���s why so many young writers will let a couple of years go by before they start another book. It���s only when you get older that you go from one book to another, where you finish a book and two months later you���re on your new book. In the beginning, it���s two or three years between books because you want to fill up; you want to have new experience. The irony, of course, is that the immediate experience you get is not stuff you can write about; in fact you probably shouldn���t touch it yet. People have always said to me, why don���t you do an autobiography. The main reason is I don���t want to use up my crystals. What I mean is that certain experiences have an inner purity to them. They remind me of a crystal. I use the word advisedly. Your imagination can project through this experience in one direction, and you can have one piece of fiction. You can project through the same crystal in another direction and have another piece of fiction. What I call a crystal experience is not a simple one, rather a most complex one, but it has this other quality that it can be studied from many angles to produce many results. So, whenever you write about something that���s a crystal experience, you are dynamiting one of your richest narrative sources. I don���t want to write an autobiography because that���ll mean I���m done as a writer. CB: The autobiography would reveal your crystals ��� to yourself? HYLAND 13