Galley Slaves

"I am a galley slave to pen and ink" said Honoré de Balzac in 1832, and the effort involved in writing has often been remarked.

(Sir Walter Scott's diary of 1827 has the comment "Wrote six leaves today and am tired.)"

In 1851 Gustave Flaubert returned to Balzac's image: "What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!"

Charles Dickens, writing to his son Harry in 1868, reflected: "Look at some of my manuscripts as are in the library at Gad's, and think of the patient hours devoted year after year to single lines".

Nearly thirty years later, Henry James said, "I find twenty-five years of practice only make me write slower and slower; so that I am rapidly reaching a fine maximum of twenty-five words a day."

The following year, Joseph Conrad wrote of the difficulty of getting started: "When I face that fatal manuscript it seems to me that I have forgotten how to think – worse! how to write."

George Orwell in the middle of the 20th century, considering why he wrote, gave the judgement, "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness."

Somehow, though, what Yeats called "the fascination of what's difficult" continues to draw writers back to confronting "the blank, implacable sheet of white paper" (Paul Scott).

Perhaps the key to it is found in the words of Virginia Woolf: "Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything."

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The Oxford Companion to English Literature: Sixth Edition Revised published June 2006 features over 140 contributors, including Lisa Appignanesi, Jonathan Coe, Penelope Fitzgerald, Margaret Forster, John Gribbin, Richard Holmes, Michael Holroyd, Sheridan Morley, Roy Porter, Salman Rushdie, Ned Sherrin, Hilary Spurling, David Stafford, John Sutherland.

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