And Another Thing | 14 February 2009

Being a professional writer is a hard life. Producing a book, especially a long one, is a severe test of courage and endurance. For even after a successful day of writing, one must begin again the next morning, the blank sheet of paper in front of you: a daunting image to start the day, the mind empty, the brain groaning. I know. I have been at it for the best part of six long decades, and the number of books I have written is creeping up to 50. Several are over 1,000 printed pages. Think of the agony! I have no complaints, really. I have made a good living, and received more than my share of praise. But I like to mull over the special compensations which occasionally reward authors.

I am thinking particularly of those works, always short — sometimes very short — which are written on impulse, usually in record time, and which somehow hit a mark, right on target, bring unexpected fame and fortune, and live on to delight people long after the lucky author is mouldering away. A good example is Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. He wrote it over two or three weeks in October and November 1843, when he was supposedly overwhelmed by producing on time the monthly numbers of Martin Chuzzlewit. It was causing him trouble, was selling fewer copies than he had hoped, and to turn aside from it and venture into a completely new field of a short Christmas romance, with ghosts and what-not, must have seemed a mad thing to do. But Dickens suddenly had an overwhelming desire to ‘do something for the poor’.