And always I was dogged by the fear that my creative powers were fading for good, that I should never be able to write anything else in the future. Sometimes I would spend two hours without getting one short paragraph of revision right. She felt she was disintegrating, mentally and physicallyendlessly, she noted her anxieties over whether the characters worked: never, never have I suffered so over any piece of work. She was so anxious that her first novel should be a success after the long years of frustration that she spent two years on rewriting, when every line of dialogue reverberated in her head, interrupting her sleep, causing her to wake each day with a visceral dread, her mind nagged with doubt, her brain throbbing. She kept a 100,000-word notebook on her progress, which reveals that it almost drove her to a breakdown. In her introductory essay to I Capture the Castle'(included in the Folio Society edition), Valerie Grove describes the torment experienced by Smith in the writing of 'the novel:' These words resonated with me as they were the third time in as many books that Id come across a similar sentiment the other books being Nabokovs' Lolita and Dodie Smiths I Capture the Castle, both of which are transcendent works that involve literary types and themes in a way thats mesmerisingly recursive. When reading PG Wodehouses' Love Among the Chickens'recently'I was struck by the narrators curiosity regarding to what extent the work of authors is influenced by their private affairs. If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader.
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