[V.S.] Pritchett begins with a conventional and not very promising theme, writers and money, and quietly turns it into a meditation on the importance of time, “the one necessity of their lives, not simply for high jinks — everyone has that — but time for their particular work.” He distinguishes two sorts of time important to writers: “…the clock time of his prose factory and the vitally necessary unending time of reflection; without the latter his work that clocks in will be dead and automatic.”
Writing has a long gestation because the writer never knows what might prove useful. If he is, as Henry James suggests he ought to be, “one of those on whom nothing is lost,” he has no spare time, no “down time,” no time to kill. A hastily written pen-for-hire piece of journalism may have decades-old origins unknown even to the writer. Every thought, every experience, every book read, might come in handy. Pritchett alludes to Keats’ notion of “negative capability” and adds: “A writer must have the capacity to become passive and lost in doubt in order to be open to new suggestion. He must alternate between clocking in and clocking out.”
Patrick Kurp, “‘They Never Stop Working'”, Anecdotal Evidence, 2014-09-17.
October 3, 2015
QotD: The hidden roots of writing
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