I share the pain

6 September 2009 | ,

Stephen Fry understands the precise feeling:

I began writing seriously when I was about thirteen. Out streamed poetry, stories and novels, the latter of which were always aborted early, usually half way through the second chapter. It took my friend Douglas Adams to encourage me to go further and he did this by pointing out that the reason I had never managed to finish a novel was that I had never properly understood how difficult, how ragingly and absurdly difficult, it is to do. “It is almost impossibly hard,” he told me. It is supposed to be. But once you truly understand how difficult it is,” he added, with signature paradoxicality, “it all becomes a lot easier.” It was many years later that Clive James quoted to me Thomas Mann’s superb crystallisation of this “A writer,” said Mann, “is a person for whom writing is more difficult than for other people.” How liberating that definition is.

In the middle of chapter 4, I am suffering.

10 thoughts on “I share the pain”

  1. I feel your pain. Still working on Master’s Thesis and I find myself highly resistant at times to continuing or worse perhaps, editing and rewrites. All the best.

    Cheers.

  2. And that’s totally normal. Sometimes i think it has to be like that. Just keep on going … at one point its all going to make sense.

  4. Hi David,

    I am OK, just needing time off due to stress and anxiety. It all got too much but I am on the mend and hope to be back with you all before long. Lx

  5. The writing is fine, by the way. The suffering was not literal or too painful suffering, just artistic suffering, if you see what I mean…

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