When your creative juices bring nothing but trouble

Originally a “dead-line” was a ring drawn around a US military prison, beyond which a prisoner would be shot. Printers also used a “dead line” to measure blocks of print. The more martial etymology seems apt in the case of George RR Martin, who has reportedly failed to submit on time the sixth book in his ferociously violent and ferociously popular A Song of Fire and Ice series, upon which the HBO television series Game of Thrones is based. (Mr Martin would not last long in his own fictional world, where hesitation ends in death.)

He is facing criticism as a result but writers frequently miss deadlines. They are often accused of being lazy and spoilt; some doubtless are. Writers meet other deadlines, however, like paying taxes and renewing a driving licence.

The problem is that writers are not in total control of the creative process but rather struggling through a semi-abusive, passive-aggressive relationship with what seems to be a separate entity. They are more like the manager of an intermittently brilliant but thoroughly unreliable and volatile employee, who ignores deadlines and is impossible to incentivise.

Basically the creative process has a 24-hour gambling problem. Writers try various inducements: the silent treatment, ignoring it in the hope that it will feel neglected and come running back. Grovelling disgusts it. Occasionally it may respond to blind panic, at which point it drops by for a pity shag. The results are mediocre at best.

Gin has been known to assist: the creative process does like its cocktails but after two it is no good to anyone. There is a fine line between help and hindrance: before you know it you are F Scott Fitzgerald, writing The Great Gatsby in ten months and then taking almost ten years to produce Tender is the Night. (His wife Zelda’s breakdown did not help but mostly it was the gin.)

What looks like procrastination may simply be an addiction enthusiastically meeting its own deadlines. But the creative process can also just feel sluggish. Sometimes it takes off for a holiday. It can definitely be freaked out by spotlights and pressure, which is probably what is happening to Mr Martin. Maybe it is there, chugging along, just more rheumatically than it used to. We cannot be sure that Mr Martin is not at his desk every day, writing away.

That, though, does not necessarily mean he is nearer to finishing his book. Writing can itself be a displacement activity: just ask my agent, who thinks I am writing a book about Henry James right now. Note-taking is a classic instance — the historian Fernand Braudel had to be separated from his notes to finish his history of the Mediterranean. It was only his being thrown into a prisoner-of-war camp by the Germans that got the job done.

George Eliot is merciless in Middlemarch about Edward Casaubon, the scholar who never finishes his “Key to All Mythologies” because he has (accidentally on purpose) chosen an impossible task. Lots of people want to have written a book; far fewer actually want to write one. This is where magical thinking, including perfectionism and procrastination, comes in.

Lots of people want to have written a book; far fewer actually want to write one

Thus in Albert Camus’s The Plague, a character who says he is writing a book spends weeks working on a “mere conjunction” and has completed just one sentence.

A novelist in Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys does the opposite, incessantly adding to a book he will never finish. Procrastination is so endemic that many writers end up producing books about it, like people queueing all night for a club who have so much fun with the bouncer that they go off and party with him instead.

This is how Geoff Dyer turned his inability to write a book about DH Lawrence into a sublime book about DH Lawrence called Out of Sheer Rage.

Some do just give up and throw themselves wholeheartedly into procrastination. Twenty years after the 1993 publication of his novel A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth was said to be in “delicate negotiations” with Penguin over his failure to deliver the sequel; it is scheduled for publication this year. Penguin should count its blessings: the short-story writer Harold Brodkey took 32 years to deliver his first novel. His creative process must have been a monster.

Another short-story writer, Katherine Anne Porter, needed 22 years to complete her only novel Ship of Fools, which became a bestseller; when readers complained, Porter retorted: “Look here, this is my life and my work and you keep out of it. When I have a book I will be glad to have it published.” The truth is that all writers are glad to have finished a book, because it is the only way to give the creative process the boot.

The writer is professorial fellow in American literature at the School of Advanced Study, University of London

Letter in response to this article:

Deadlines fly over the heads of some writers / From Janet Dignan