Once, in the middle of the night, I watched a Youtuber try to live one week of their life according to Haruki Murakami’s writing schedule.

In the 1996 movie Fargo the movie opens with the following text:

> ‘This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.’

What does it take to craft the ‘perfect’ sentence? To have your masterpiece sit alongside the behemoths of the literary world—Wilde, Woolf, Didion, Garner, Flanagan and Malouf? What does it take to string together a perfect group of words, that form a perfect group of sentences that form a piece of work that is timeless, moving and memorable?