Foibles and fetishes - how writers write

Which writer regularly wrote stark naked? Which drank all day and pretty much all night? Which had to have sex to get in the mood to work? Which were addicted to narcotics? Which were stark raving bonkers? Which were heavily addicted to caffeine? (The last was Balzac, "the only great writer to drink himself to death with coffee".)

Many readers and most aspiring writers are fascinated with how writers actually write. I think for aspiring writers it's something to do with finding the secret, the trick to it - even if it's Victor Hugo's trick of writing stark naked in a glass walled room on the roof of his house on the highest spot on Guernsey (no helicopters in those days).

I found several titbits of like value in Page Fright (by Canadian writer Harry Bruce), a vastly entertaining read of the gossip page variety, but also extremely helpful for the aspiring writer wanting to find the "trick to it". From the evidence of these pages there isn't one.

A lot of writers turn out to be complete luddites, eschewing typewriters for fountain pens or new fangled word processors for their trusty IBM electric typewriters (this book was published in 2009!) A great many were bonkers, or at least very sad and rather tragic (Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath) but many are completely sane, including a writer I admire very much - Margaret Atwood.

Some were prolific (eg, Balzac) and some very non-prolific (eg, Flaubert). Either prolific or non-prolific they could be junkies (Coleridge) or alcoholics (Fitzgerald). They almost all wrote with drive and discipline, even while continually boozing (Carson McCullers).

The lesson from all this is profoundly encouraging for the aspiring writer - there is no trick, everything has worked for someone at some stage, so just do it. You don't have to be crazy or even write much (see JD Salinger who recently died after years of silence and still achieved extensive retrospective analyses of his work). However, most of them were dedicated to their craft. Whatever else, they wrote.

Bruce also includes a long introductory section about the actual development of writing tools, enlightening me, anyway, about why goose quills were used for writing for so long (until they invented steel metal wasn't springy enough) and how much time it took to keep them fit for writing (continual sharpening).

So if you want to know how many alcoholics have won the Nobel Prize for Literature (5), who was the first great writer to use a typewriter (Mark Twain - he didn't like it), who was an insomniac (Dickens, among many) and which writers had execrable handwriting (most of them) this is the book for you.