My Years With Proust - Day 698

So that the essential, the only true book, though in the ordinary sense of the word it does not have to be "invented" by a great writer - for it exists already in each one of us - has to be translated by him.  The function and the task of a writer are those of a translator.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 926

I wonder if someone doesn't become a "writer", in the sense of a craftsman, until their second or third novel.  They lived with their "essential . . . only true book" for years, and they only had to translate it.  The argument would be that even if the translation was a "loose" one it was still based on an internal book that had existed for years, and every following book would be based on smaller and smaller segments of the original whole, and thus they require more specific, deliberate, acts or creation.