It’s something writers like to moan about. Personally I’ve
always regarded it — I prefer to call it solitude — as one of the profession’s
great attractions.
Anyway it doesn’t have to be like that: once one has
actually had a book or two published, I mean professionally as opposed to mere
paid-for vanity publishing, (though now that writers have at last realized that
most publishers are lazy greedy parasites, the line between self-publishing and
vanity-publishing is vague), and belongs to a professional organization (a
trade union, in fact) like the Society of Authors, all sorts of perks, with
associated non-compulsory social contact with other writers, become available,
and one can find out about them simply by looking in ‘The Author’ or one or two
literary periodicals. (one doesn’t have to engage with such idiotic nonsense as
Facebook or Twitter.)
As an extremely minor writer whom no-one has heard of, I
have had —usually free or cheap — stays, usually of a month or more, at, among
other places: the Neuschwanstein-like Hawthornden Castle, near Edinburgh. The
lakeside campus of the University of East Anglia. Tyrone Guthrie’s big country
house near Monaghan. The old British Admiralty building in Rhodes. An
upper-middle-class big house with huge garden in Reigate. Then there have been
the weekend conferences, among them a long weekend in Athens, which included a
one-day cruise around the nearer islands, complete with a quite ghastly
orchestra — a cross between Mariachi and Bouzouki band — for the fat wives of
publishers (and the wives of fat publishers) to dance to.
And all the above free or nearly so, and with the
socializing entirely optional, and no-one thinking any the worse of you if you
decided to hide in your room, or the library, and actually do some writing.
So, writers, stop bitching about the loneliness of your
sullen craft and art, and get applying. You have nothing to lose except your
gloom.
This is Hawthornden Castle.
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