| | Well, Andrew,if you will waste time 'doing' your flatmates, ... Quite apart from the time-wasting, isn't this a clear violation of 'Rule Fifteen' ? :-)
More seriously, I'm impressed with the prolific Anthony Burgess, who made a point of writing at least one-thousand words every day (and even more when he first began as a writer):
Diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in 1959 and given only one year to live, Burgess decided to remake himself into a writer. He calculated that if he wrote 2,000 words a day, every day, by the end of the year he could produce 730,000 words or about 7 novels of 100,000 words each whose royalties would provide income for his wife. He nearly succeeded, writing five and a half novels, including "A Clockwork Orange," during that time. But the diagnosis, it turned out, was wrong. As an established author, Burgess continued producing novels, nonfiction essays and reviews of literature, television and drama.
Burgess's output is extraordinary, especially for one who came to writing in his forties. As the Times Literary Supplement describes his output: The bookshelf sags under what looks like a story of blistering success: more than thirty novels, many published to international critical acclaim; dozens of non-fiction titles, from a discursive study of beds to a two-volume, 1,200-page history of English literature, written in Italian; the long entry for the Novel in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; librettos and musical scores (symphonies, song settings, sonatas); translations into and out of English; screenplays, documentaries and lectures; and countless reviews, thousands and thousands of them, a sample to be found in two collections, Urgent Copy (1968) and Homage to Qwert Yuiop (1986).
Another extraordinarily prolific writer was Sir Walter Scott, whose books as one writer has said "simply poured off his desk," many of them being written while he continued to work full-time as a lawyer. "He that sleeps too long in the morning," said Scott, "let him borrow the pillow of a debtor." At his peak, he was earning upwards of ten-thousand pounds a year in royalties and advances - a tidy sum in the Napolenic Age! A further eample of enormous productive energy is that of Carlyle. When John Stuart Mill's maid accidentally threw into the fire Carlyle's painfully completed manuscript on the French Revolution, rather than turning to drink as many of us would be tempted to do, he settled down in true Victorian fashion to write it all over again. "“The resulting second version was filled with a passionate intensity, hitherto unknown in historical writing,” says Wikipedia. And so we might expect!
(Edited by Peter Cresswell on 11/05, 9:43pm)
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