Cobbler's Wax

Hi friend,

Anthony Trollope paid an old groom five pounds a year to wake him at half past five in the morning, and the man's entire duty consisted of knocking, bringing coffee, and making certain that Trollope did not go back to sleep.

He sat down with a watch laid in front of him where he could see it. The first half hour went to reading over yesterday's pages, and after that he required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour, checking the watch to confirm that he had produced them.

He kept this up for three hours, ate breakfast, and went to his job at the Post Office, where he worked for two decades while writing his novels and where, among other duties, he introduced the red pillar boxes that still stand on British streets.

If he came to the end of a novel and the three hours were not finished, he did not stop to celebrate or to rest. He took a fresh sheet of paper and began the next one without putting down his pen.

Over thirty-nine years this produced forty-seven novels, seventeen works of nonfiction, travel books, essays, plays, and a translation of Caesar. He refused to let ships or trains interrupt the schedule and wrote on both. By the end he had earned something near seventy thousand pounds from his writing, which in the middle of the nineteenth century was a fortune.

Then he wrote down how he had done it, and the admission cost him his standing as a serious novelist for the better part of a hundred years.

He finished the autobiography in 1876 and left it in a drawer with instructions that his son publish it after his death, which Henry did in 1883, a few months after Henry James had published an essay that did Trollope considerable harm on its own.

James made the charge that would follow Trollope into the next century. He wrote that the man had published too much, that novel-writing had become a mechanical process for him, and that Dickens and Thackeray, prolific as they were, had at least been able to wait for inspiration before they worked.

The autobiography arrived three months later and read, to anyone already persuaded by James, like a signed confession.

There was the watch. There was the quota. There was the groom with the coffee. There were the novels begun mid-session on a fresh sheet, and there were the lists, which Trollope set down without a trace of embarrassment, of precisely what each book had earned him.

The writers coming up in the eighties and nineties had been raised on a more exalted theory of what a novel was, and they read all this and concluded that Trollope had been a machine rather than an artist, a tradesman who happened to work in sentences instead of leather.

His reputation did not recover in his son's lifetime, and it did not recover in his grandson's either.

What Trollope actually wrote in that book was not a confession at all. It was an attack, and a contemptuous one.

He said that when he heard men preach the doctrine of waiting for inspiration, he could hardly hold back his scorn, and he compared such a man to a shoemaker sitting idle until the mood to make shoes descended upon him.

Someone had once told him that the great aid to writing a book was a piece of cobbler's wax on the chair, meaning that a man should stick to the seat until the work was done, and Trollope said he believed in the cobbler's wax a good deal more than he believed in the inspiration.

He was not apologising for his method. He was calling the entire romantic account of creative work a fraud, in print, with forty-seven novels standing behind him as evidence, and the literary world of the 1880s buried him for saying it.

I think the reason had very little to do with literature, and a great deal to do with what he had taken away from them.

As long as the work depends on inspiration, on temperament, on some rare condition arriving from outside, then the man who has produced nothing has not failed at anything. He is waiting.

Waiting is respectable, it can be discussed at length in good company, and it has the enormous advantage of never being tested. A man may wait his entire life and die with his gift intact and unspent, and his friends will say at the funeral that he was the most talented of them all.

Trollope walked into that arrangement and said the thing is a trade. You sit down at half past five whether you want to or not. You write your two hundred and fifty words whether they are any good or not, and you find out later which ones were.

The difference between a man with a body of work and a man without one is not the quality of his inner life, and it is not sensitivity or suffering or vision. It is whether he was in the chair.

For anyone not in the chair, that is intolerable. It converts a whole creative identity into a question of attendance, and it is a question you fail every morning without ever being told you have failed.

So they did not argue with him. They called him mechanical, which is the polite way of saying that a man is not one of us, and having settled that, they went back to waiting.

The version of this doctrine you are handed now is softer and it comes with better production, but it does the same work.

Find your why. Wait until you feel aligned. Honour your energy. Do not force it when the feeling is not there. Rest until you are ready, protect your creative state, and trust that the work will come when the conditions are right.

It sounds like wisdom about sustainability, and I notice that in practice it licenses doing nothing on any day when doing something would be unpleasant, which is most days, which is the whole difficulty.

I have used those sentences myself. I'll start when my head is clearer. It is a comfortable thing to say and it has never once been true.

Your mood does not know anything about whether the work should be done today. It is weather moving through a body, and it will be different by the afternoon, and Trollope's answer to weather was a servant, a watch, and a number, because he understood that a decision made fresh each morning by a man who has just woken up is a decision that man is going to lose.

The people selling you dreams are selling the inspiration model, and they are selling it because it is what men want to buy.

Nobody wants a watch on the desk and a quota he has to meet before the sun is properly up. Everyone wants to hear that he is one insight away, one mindset shift away, one correct morning routine away from becoming the sort of person who finally feels like doing the work.

Trollope sold something worse and truer, and the market punished him for a century.

Until next time
Lorenc - Founder of Success Skill