So you think once you're a successful writer your life transforms and you get away from all those distractions? Think again, here's AL Kennedy writing in The Guardian about getting her new novel started:
"I pretty much always should be somewhere and someone other than I am at this point. The initial stages of all my novels have always been sabotaged by (in order) my day job, my part-time job, the other writing I was doing while I was writing them, the work I was meant to have finished long before I got to this point and – naturally – the hideous diseases which flesh is heir to, if you persist in making it work and sit on trains and never give it days off and trips to the zoo with balloons. Or even without balloons."
Oh well, at least as a successful writer you don't have any of those anxieties about whether you're getting it right. Or maybe not. AL Kennedy again:
"A greater part of writing than you might suppose relies upon the writer ignoring or temporarily setting aside a whole circus troupe of ugly fears and just typing in spite of them. Once I've dodged my own novel-related anxieties I can get used to the familiar cycle of enthusiasms and despairs – I wake up in the middle of the night having finally found out the male protagonist's proper name: he promptly stops speaking to me and I lie in the dark wondering what he's up to, if he's found someone else to let him be expressed ... ?"
But surely a pro doesn't suffer from procrastination. Hmm:
"I look forward to being no longer poorly [she had the flu] and therefore able to avoid the whole novel-writing issue in a more traditional manner - by dusting, making soup, staring, pacing, repainting the stairwell, dozing, crying, fainting ... Even so, I'll always eventually end up battering away at the thing until it batters back. It's lovely and it's mind-bending and I wouldn't be without it. Onwards."
Yep, that's pretty much how it is when you start out and how it is when you're established. The important part is the "Onwards."
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