One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.

Doctorow is describing a hard-won shift from treating writing as the transcription of a preplanned idea to treating it as a mode of discovery. “Trust the act of writing” suggests faith in process: that meaning, structure, and even subject can emerge only through sustained attention to sentences on the page. The second sentence underscores writing as inquiry—placing oneself in the conditions where the work can reveal what it is about. The remark aligns with Doctorow’s broader reputation for composing amid uncertainty and letting narrative intelligence arise from drafting rather than from exhaustive outlining, emphasizing humility before the work and the generative power of revision.