Even when there seems to be a more straightforward matter of a writer moving slowly – as in, for example, Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, which took a decade to write – it is revealed to be more a case of endeavour and precision rather than existential crisis (it took him five years to get the opening chapter right). But this was not writer’s block, it was a writer making choices the academic work and essays that Robinson undertakes as well as her fiction writing are just as much a part of her creative and intellectual identity. Marilynne Robinson, for example, whose output as a novelist paused for nearly 25 years after her brilliant debut Housekeeping, published in 1980 when it recommenced, with Gilead, it did so in Pulitzer prize-winning fashion, and two subsequent novels. T he drama of the unforthcoming second novel is often a great deal more intense and traumatic to literary onlookers than it is to their putative creators.
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