Comment by a_bonobo 3 days ago
I've heard this many times before (I think Charles Bukowski used to preach this?), and I have to say I disagree. Famously Douglas Adams had to be forced to write every sentence in the Hitchhiker's Guide. He certainly didn't have a book inside him that had to get out, he had external deadlines and rent to pay. Can you imagine a world without HGTTG?
> What happens when you walk up to a publishing agent and tell them you don’t have anything to show them…
They told him to hand over whatever he'd got:
"Douglas happily built his reputation for (at this stage, merely) sailing close to the wind when it came to publishing deadlines by telling interviewers that he had been ordered to literally stop writing and hand his manuscript over to a courier no matter where he had got to…"
— The Frood: The Authorised and Very Official History of Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Jem Roberts"
He was famous for scraping or missing deadlines from the very start, and openly admitted to it:
"All of my life I've been attracted to the idea of being a writer, but like all writers I don't so much like writing as having written. … each time I meant to try to write something, I'd miss the deadline by two weeks."
> "All of my life I've been attracted to the idea of being a writer, but like all writers I don't so much like writing as having written. … each time I meant to try to write something, I'd miss the deadline by two weeks."
Having written several works without ever completing or publishing any of them, I find this comment from Adams particularly resonates with me. That said, I’ve had success with a narrative podcast, which is heavily influenced by his genius—his wit and comedic writing style shine through. While I’ve always admired what he brought to the sci-fi comedy genre, in hindsight, I probably owe just as much gratitude to his editor and publisher.
Digital Antiquarian has a few posts up recently about Douglas Adams, and it all sounds like it was a great deal more painful than I had ever realized as a kid reading _Hitchhiker's_: https://www.filfre.net/2024/07/the-later-years-of-douglas-ad...
Considering how much he loved everything else and how well he was able to do things like radio shows or video or inspire text adventures, I do have to wonder if forcing him to write books was pounding a square peg into a round hole.
He was a successful TV and radio script author on household name projects like Dr Who, and the HHGTTG radio show was already a huge hit.
The book was practically guaranteed to be a best-seller.
> Can you imagine a world without HGTTG?
Yes. Maybe an unpopular opinion here, but the book form of HGTTG is a mess. You can tell that it was converted from an episodic weekly-gag-based radio show into written form with very little effort to make it into a coherent whole. It's popular because it has brilliant one-liners, but as a book it's not nearly as good as its popularity would suggest.
You actually see something similar today with web serials.
An author starts a story, writes a few chapters, and then presents it to the Internet. They acquire a following, and keep putting up chapters.
But even if they start with a solid outline and a world building bible and a binder full of character secrets, the story rarely follows a smooth plot arc -- they have new ideas as they write, and some things don't work the way they'd hoped, and maybe they are not sure how to move from point A to B and spend a few weeks putting up chapters where both they and their characters go in circles for a bit.
And then it's finished, the next logical step is to republish it as a book. They could treat the web serial as a first draft, and rewrite it now that they have the whole thing figured out. Throw away some of the meandering, save a few disjointed chapters for short story anthologies, fix some of the character drift that isn't development, drop the plot lines you never finished, and add a bit more foreshadowing to the early chapters for things they didn't figure out until later.
But well, the book's already been published, right? And people liked it well enough? So why write the same book twice, and not just clean up the spelling and grammatical mistakes and publish it as is?
>Famously Douglas Adams had to be forced to write every sentence in the Hitchhiker's Guide. He certainly didn't have a book inside him that had to get out, he had external deadlines and rent to pay.
The book was written 45 years ago, an entirely different media market, was based of a story he had already developed for radio, and we have no idea if this anecdote is apocryphal.
HHTG was an odd one since he was adapting existing material (the radio series) to a novel form.
HGGHT
Is bureaucratically
Not Exact enough you see
----------------------
We will be denying
your acronym
and you will be dying
Just like him
did.
on edit: HN formatting is in violation of several rules and will be punished.
You are most likely not Douglas Adams though. He was obviously incredibly gifted and good at what he did. 99.9% of people will not be that talented.
So 0.1% of people who don't have a burning desire for it should still write a book, which seems like a large amount of people to me.
And there's not really a way to know if you're gifted and talented at writing, so just go for it anyways. Your appeal to exception falls flat because there's no reason why there can't be another one.
> I disagree. Famously Douglas Adams had to be forced to write every sentence
Who says we all need to be Douglas Adams? If the book is only for you then the bar is very low.
With creativity there's an overlap between creating for oneself and creating for others. You might start with the former but end up craving the latter. But most people creating things don't require validation from others; it would just be nice.
What happens when you walk up to a publishing agent and tell them you don’t have anything to show them, and they’ll need to force you to write every sentence but assure them it’ll be brilliant?
I think you’re also talking about one of Adams’ later books after HHGTG once his publisher was deep in hock for his advance.