Ten Years in the Tub (117 page)

One of the things that did me no good at all in the formative years of my career was prescriptive advice from established writers, even though I craved it at the time. You know the sort of thing: “Write a minimum of fifteen drafts.” “A good book takes five years to produce.” “Learn
Ulysses
off by heart.” “Make sure you can identify trees.” “Read your book out loud to your cat.” I cannot tell an oak from another tree, the name of which I cannot even dredge up for illustrative purposes, and yet I got by, somehow. Walk into a bookshop and you will see work by writers who produce a book every three months, writers who don't own a TV, writers with five children, writers who produce a book every twenty-five years, writers who never write sober, writers who have at least one eye on the film rights, writers who never think about money, writers who, in your opinion, can't write at all. It doesn't matter: they got the work done, and there they are, up on the shelves. They might not stay there forever: readers, now and way off into the future, make that decision. Claire Tomalin's wonderful and definitive book is, above all, about a man who got the work done, millions of words of it, and to order, despite all the distractions and calamities. And everything else, the fame, and the money, and the giant shadow that he continues to cast over just about everyone who has written since, came from that. There's nothing else about writing worth knowing, really.

January 2012

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
The Family Fang
—Kevin Wilson

     
  
Letters to Monica
—Philip Larkin

     
  
Bury Me Deep
—Megan Abbott

     
  
Wild Abandon
—Joe Dunthorne

     
  
Brother of the More Famous Jack
—Barbara Trapido

     
  
Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN
—James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
The Family Fang
—Kevin Wilson