One for whom writing is more difficult than for others

Thomas Mann came up with this painfully acute description of a writer and I stumbled on it the  other day on someone’s blog, shortly after being horrified at discovering how many times I had revised my book on scribd.com, just in the absolutely final, final, definitely just about finished stages.  I was reminded of an author friend from my yachting days who described a book he had just written as “the sort of thing you would knock off while sat on the bog in the morning”.  As someone who routinely spends weeks agonising over the placing of a comma, I cannot tell you the depth of envy this drove me to.

When I married, as Terry Wogan would put it, my present wife, I had just contracted to write two books on sailing matters.  Two months later, having not managed a single word,  I actually had to move out to a rented cottage alone, in order to summon the depth of concentration I needed to do this thing.  My friend would have knocked it off during the honeymoon, sat on the bog every morning.  O frabjous joy.

Scribd, if you do not know it, is a site that stores and displays all sorts of writing.  I found it while looking for a good way to present my book on the internet for the free reading thereof.  It has this nice Flash Video technology called i-paper which enables you to turn the pages on the screen as though it were a book, complete with the shadows as a page rolls over.