A Writer's Time

 
I came to the study of law because it seemed like a good career for someone who loved reading, writing, and analyzing texts but was not creative enough to make it as a novelist nor independently wealthy enough to risk becoming a medievalist.  I also thought that studying law would allow me to make things happen in a way that studying the venerable Bede might not.  I question some of my reasoning now, but the decision has turned out to be an excellent one for me.  Yet I always admire those who tread the path not taken.  One of them is my friend Maud Newton, who was one of my very fist research assistants in her former life--the one she partly abandoned to pursue her dream of writing fiction.  Maud  (though I still think of her by a different name) is a well known literary blogger, and she and I share a fascination with the writing process.  She has a great post this week about her struggles to finish her novel, and it includes the following quotation from E.B. White:

[T]here is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments — moments of sustained creation — when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

I am not a novelist, but I do presume to call myself a writer, and I find it oddly encouraging that the great E.B. White experienced the same joys and frustrations with writing that I do.  I plan to track down One Man's Meat, the work from which this quotation was drawn, immediately.