They say you should face your fears. One of my biggest fears is that someone will read my notebooks and realise that I’m mad, that I can’t write, and that even when I do write, my first drafts are so terrible that I should be shot in the name of literature. So, here it is. Several pages of my notebook. Uncut. The only thing I’ve corrected is the spelling.
People used to keep seeing my ideas being made by other people before I finished writing them. I’d get an idea for a story, and before you knew it, it was a film, or a novel, with someone else’s name attached. I decided that I was a talentless hack, with no originality. But one of my friends joked that I’d sprung a leak and should be kept in an idea proof room until I’d completed a novel and gotten it published. This gave me an idea for a story about a nutty old man, a famous writer and recluse, who’d locked himself away in a room lined with other people’s words, so that his own ideas couldn’t escape or be stolen…
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