One day Goethe called on his fellow-writer, Friedrich Schiller, only to find that he had gone out. Informed that he would return shortly, he went to Schiller’s writing-table to jot down a few notes and was sickened, almost to the point of fainting, by the smell coming from one of the table-drawers, which he discovered to be full of rotten apples. ‘I immediately went to the window,’ Goethe later recalled, ‘and inhaled the fresh air, by which I felt myself instantly restored. In the meantime his wife had re-entered, and told me that the drawer was always filled with rotten apples, because the scent was beneficial to Schiller, and he could not live or work without it.’
One person’s aid to writing may be another’s poison, and anyone offering practical hints for writers would do well to remember this. Even so, a few suggestions may be helpful.
