this book, Boy, is an absolutely fantastic autobiography - filled with all the delightful imaginings Dahl is famous for. i rolled myself out on the grass and laughed and laughed through these pages. so inspiring.
anyway, i want to post here a passage from this book that addresses the process of writing - being a creative writer - a topic i was hoping he would speak about.
[context] he's talking about his first job working for Shell in England and how much he enjoyed being a businessman; "all very serious and dignified gents taking the train to our offices in the City...engaged in high finance and other enormously important matters." He goes on to say,
"I began to realise how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to the desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves a particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it" (155-6).
why are these words so marvelous, for me? because i can totally relate to it. not that am putting back the whisky like there's no tomorrow, but that it is very difficult to be thinking up, and finding time to write out, the new - that levaing the writer's space (mental imagining ground) is trying and sometimes torturous. i don't want to leave - it's so scary outside where things are out of your hands (literally, where the pen is gone and the characters and action run their course, which is totally unknown) - and, that this fool is not alone. it's funny, writing can be such a solitary process - where you speak with the dead and through the written word, across pages.
i read this and fell in love - hope you can dig it too.
and, his books are wonderous - do read them if you can. my favourites are, the witches, george's marvelous medicine, james and the giant peach, and the BFG!
