Lahiri on the Sentence

Draft is a new New York Times blog series about the art and craft of writing. Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Unaccustomed Earth, The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies, was asked to write the first entry. She writes:

All the revision I do — and this process begins immediately, accompanying the gestation — occurs on a sentence level. It is by fussing with sentences that a character becomes clear to me, that a plot unfolds. To work on them so compulsively, perhaps prematurely, is to see the trees before the forest. And yet I am incapable of conceiving the forest any other way.