There is more waste and frustration in the professional writer’s life than the mere reading public can know about. Commissions are sometimes accepted and then found impossible of fulfilment. I have known writers who have worked hard on the documentation of a life of Lloyd George or Marie Antoinette and even completed several hundred pages of a first draft, only to find that the machine will no longer go –– a lack of temperamental fuel, an inability to steer, a sudden shocking boredom with the whole journey. One is not paid for work wasted, though one’s literary agent may be. It is right to return an advance to the commissioning publisher, but it is dangerous to accept the advance in the first place. It feels like money earned because time and energy have been expended. But work is not necessarily a work. Appalled at waste, a writer will sometimes push on hopelessly to complete a book that he needs no reviewer to tell him is abysmally bad. The need to earn generates guilt, and guilt is partially dissolved in alcohol: that is where a good deal of the unearned advance tends to go.
You've Had Your Time (1990)
Use the link below to visit THE INTERNATIONAL ANTHONY BURGESS FOUNDATION, an English-based organisation which 'encourages and supports public and scholarly interest in all aspects of the life and work of Anthony Burgess' in addition to operating a museum/performance space in his birthplace of Manchester:
http://www.anthonyburgess.org/
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