Fear the Reaper!

Not making any progress with your novel?  Make Death your fearsome ally.

Allow me to explain with a little illustration from the life of Anthony Burgess.  First of all, for anyone under 60, Anthony Burgess is not as well-known as he once was.  That said, pretty much everyone would know, or would at the very least have heard of, his most famous work, the short novel A Clockwork Orange, first published in 1962 and released as a highly controversial film (directed by the brilliant Stanley Kubrick) in 1971. 

Anthony Burgess is now out of favour as a novelist – almost as much as the equally controversial (in his day) D. H. Lawrence.  Both were highly productive writers and in both cases their close ally in this was Death.  Yes, I’m saying that neither would have generated the output that they did if they’d had a clean bill of health.

D. H. Lawrence lived under the constant threat of being consumed by tuberculosis and moved to the drier and sunnier climate of New Mexico, amongst other places, in a vain attempt to battle against it; the case of Burgess was rather stranger than that.  In 1959 Burgess collapsed while teaching in Brunei and was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour. Troubled by the thought of leaving his wife without income, he wrote five novels in the next year (yes FIVE NOVELS IN ONE YEAR) and a total of eleven by 1964. These include: The Doctor Is Sick, The Wanting Seed, A Clockwork Orange, Honey for the Bears, and Nothing Like the Sun. He also produced two works, One Hand Clapping and Inside Mr. Enderby, under the pseudonym Joseph Kell.

During the following years, Burgess continued to prove his doctors' prognoses wrong and claimed to write 2,000 words per day. He supplemented the income from his novels with literary reviews and essays for numerous newspapers and magazines. He also produced non-fiction books on English literature, linguistics, and the works of James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence (now there’s a coincidence), and William Shakespeare.

So, you can see what I’m saying.  I suspect that Burgess was always a bit of a workaholic but would he have written five novels in one year if it hadn’t been for the fear of being tapped on the shoulder at any moment by the cold hand of Death?  Probably not.

Now I’m not suggesting that you get into some kind of deal here with The Grim Reaper but what I am saying is that anything can happen.  Live life to the full, treat every day as if it could be your last, and don’t wait for a terminal diagnosis before getting down to finishing or even starting the novel.  If you want to hold that book in your hand before you draw your final breath, then get on with it now, today, this minute.  Write it while you have the health, strength and mental capacity to do so.  Carpe Diem!  Seize the Day!  Or as Nike, the Goddess of Sports Shoes would put it, Just Do it!

Here endeth the sermon.

Happy writing!