How long can it take to write a paragraph?

Answer: in my case recently about three days, or ��� more accurately ��� about three days of repeatedly getting a few lines down on the screen, then either deleting them or transferring them to a separate document rather sweetly entitled ���bits and pieces��� and starting all over again.

Writing is a rum trade. Sometimes it proceeds at a satisfyingly steady, even if not all that speedy, pace (I reckon that 1000 good words a day is all that I can ever consistently manage; anything more is a bonus���and such bonuses come rarely). Other times it grinds it a halt. It���s not that there is anything obviously the matter with the damn paragraph. It might even contain a few rather natty phrases (hence the ���bits and pieces��� document ��� you don���t want to lose them). But you find yourself looking at it with glazed eyes and unable to move on (that I think is the killer: you know that a paragraph is not right if it doesn���t launch you into the next one). So you have another go, then another, then a cup of coffee, then another go, then you see if a glass of wine will help (one sometimes does, two never), and so on.

I have now learned that when this happens it is not because of any failing of rhetoric. It is because I am trying to say the wrong thing (as one of my Twitter friends said, when I confessed this in 140 characters: ���Mate of mine once said she���d learned one thing as a writer ��� if you have to charge the door with your shoulder you���re trying the wrong door������ and I think that about sums it up).

The trouble is that is can take several days to see what���s wrong, or where the right door might be. In my case this week, I was trying to write the last 3000 words in a chapter of which I had already written 7000. Those 7000 are about the twists and turns, mainly since the early nineteenth century, in how ancient images of Julius Caesar have been identified (and there are some wonderfully revealing and quite funny stories to tell). The final 3000 look ahead to the rest of the Suetonian 12 Caesars.

The offending paragraph was trying to lay out the case for the methods of identifying all those later rulers being completely different. Now, there are some significant differences (as you will see if you buy the book in due course), and it was these I was trying to point up. But actually it is wrong to say that the methods are ���completely��� different. In fact, in many ways the intriguing puzzles in the identification of Caesar provide a rather good base for exploring the identification of all the others.

To put it another way��� and this is what hit me first ��� why on earth, Beard, did you ask your punters to read 7000 words about busts of Caesar, fun as some of those words were, if in the end you were going to turn round and say��� ���ah ha, none of that is relevant to any other emperor at all���? It���s not only untrue, it���s an impossible sell to the readership. And that, of course, is why I couldn���t write it.

I very much hope that this is now sussed. Well, I have get 700 more words I am fairly happy with, so fingers crossed.