Tolstoy como productor

What authors imagine to be immediate and personal is already shaped for them because writers do not "create" as much as the modify. And what they modify is also modifying them. They are not free spirits, but feel the weight that moves theirs pens and shapes their imaginations.

... there is nothing more central to a formalist view of a literary work its concern with the "outside" of a work. For a Formalist there is no inside with out an outside, and the central process of literary making - and consequently the central concern of the Formalists - was the study of how this "outside" became the "inside".

Tolstoy's Major Fiction. Edward Wasiolek