Now, I don’t know how deeply to go into this, in this letter. The intuitive – I might say, gestating method by which I operate has a tendency to cause me to ‘see’ the whole thing at once…Mozart operated this way. The problem for him was simply to get it down. If he lived long enough, he did so; if not, then not. In other words, according to me (but not according to you people) my work consists of getting down that which exists in my mind; my method up to now has been to develop notes of progressively greater completeness. If I believed that the first jotting-down actually carried the whole idea, I would be a poet, not a novelist; I believe that it takes about 60,000 words for me to put down my original idea in its absolute entirety.
— Philip K. Dick (in a letter to Eleanor Dimoff about his view on writing. Taken from Paul Williams’ introduction to “Confessions of a Crap Artist”)
