Several weeks ago, while wandering through my local library, I happened across an unusual autobiography: More About Boy: Tales of Childhood, by Roald Dahl. (As one might suspect from the name, there is an earlier book called Boy that deals with similar topics, but that one was not readily available. Nor was Going Solo, yet another assortment of autobiographical sketches by Dahl.)
The disconcertingly imaginative Dahl has always been a great source of fascination/consternation for me — a fact which I attribute primarily to the fact that he was responsible for one of the most enjoyable reading experiences of my childhood. And, shortly afterwards, one of the most disturbing.
What I found particularly interesting about this little collection of anecdotes, however, was Dahl’s account of the painstaking laboriousness of his writing. As a fiction writer, he was much more Beethoven than Mozart, struggling mightily to polish and perfect his literary ideas rather than having them spring forth fully formed. And he lived in constant fear of running out of ideas, saying that “a writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.”
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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Still, his constant fear and struggles could not detract from the fact that he loved what he was doing, writing elsewhere that “a person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.” So, it sounds like he came out on top in the long run.