Materiality and creativity

William Gibson in The Paris Review: 

I don’t begin a novel with a shopping list—the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It’s like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn’t a violin. That’s what I do when I’m writing a novel, except somehow I’m simultaneously generating the wood as I’m carving it.

Evelyn Fox Keller in The Century of the Gene: 

[One might] consider the mature mRNA transcript formed after editing and splicing to be the “true” gene. But if we take this option (as molecular biologists often do), a different problem arises, for such genes exist in the newly formed zygote only as possibilities, designated only after the fact. A musical analogy might be helpful here: the problem is not only that the music inscribed in the score does not exist until it is played, but that the players rewrite the score (the mRNA transcript) in their very execution of it. (63)

It's not an exact match, as Gibson talks about generating the material, whereas Keller is talking about some of the temporal and indeed ontological torsions in the notion of retroactively constituted possibilities (something I addressed here in draft form and here [Ch 10] in book form). Nonetheless it's an interesting parallel I think.