If there’s one thing writers love to write about, it’s being a writer. In this practice – where writing about what you know is taken to the extreme – there’s a particular subset in which writing is treated as a fragile thing, a gift to the writer that must be approached with care to stop the muse being frightened off. Leo Tolstoy, when asked by an anxious editor what was happening with the book he had paid such a handsome advance for, replied: “Anna Karenina has left. I am waiting for her to return.”
For every Tolstoy, there’s a Vladimir Nabokov, who, when asked in an interview about the experience some writers describe of the characters taking control of the story, responded: “What a preposterous experience! Writers who have had it must be very minor or insane.”
