the resistance took over for writing just as writing became important. A hundred years earlier, it wasn’t unusual for writers like Trollope and Dickens to write forty or more books over a career—while keeping a day job. You sat down and you wrote and then you were done. Starting in the 1950s, though, when writing became godlike, when creating the great American novel had a lot of kamiwaza associated with it, the drinking started and so did the blocking. It was easier to talk about making art than it was to actually do it. And that’s where we are today, except that everything we’re counted on
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