![]() ![]() I think that’s quite important to say, so I hope people will stop writing to me with suggestions. I haven’t got another big historical novel in view. A book grows according to a subtle and deep-laid plan. I might spend a week threading an image through a story, but moving the narrative not an inch. I may have a dozen versions of a single scene. ![]() But fiction makes me the servant of a process that has no clear beginning and end or method of measuring achievement. Writing lectures or reviews – any kind of non-fiction – seems to me a job like any job: allocate your time, marshal your resources, just get on with it. This is so alien to me that it might be another trade entirely. They sit at their desk and knock off their word quota, then frisk into their leisured evening, preening themselves. Some writers claim to extrude a book at an even rate like toothpaste from a tube, or to build a story like a wall, so many feet per day. And when I think: what do I retain from the old days? It’s a turn of phrase.” – Interviewed in the Observer in 2003. But it was never an escape, nor was it the place I was running to – because it wasn’t a refuge – but it was what enabled me, it was my source of power and it was all I’d got and it was the cheapest source of power. Because all you need is paper and pencil and you can do it horizontal. The only way I could think of was by writing. ![]() I thought: I am a wreck and have no money and am in poor health – and so how am I going to impose myself on the world? I was seethingly ambitious, I don’t make any secret of that. How many words should one write per day? However many it takes to make one feel productive and avoid that wretched writer’s guilt.I started writing in earnest at 22. It seems as though counting words is one’s way of avoiding that guilt, and therein lies the real answer to the question. Many writers have often been unable to sleep after a day in which they did not write. ![]() As Fran is always quick to point out, not writing is the easiest thing in the world however, as all writers know, it is also the most painful. The numbers on the chart showing the daily output of words differ from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so he won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.”Īnd that is really what it comes down to: guilt. “He keeps track of his daily progress – ‘so as not to kid myself’ – on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard packing case and set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head. As George Plimpton observed when he went to interview Hemingway in 1958: Then there are writers whose output varies from day to day, like Ernest Hemingway. Wodehouse who, during his 93 years on Earth, somehow managed to write, among other works, 71 novels, 24 short story collections, 42 plays, 15 film scripts, and three autobiographies. On the higher end of the output scale, there are writers like P.G. ![]()
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