Would you really want the life of a great writer?

SOMEONE sends a cartoon they’ve found on Twitter. Across the top it reads “Behind every great novelist is ...” and underneath are a row of little drawings.

These illustrate nine things commonly found in the life of writers: childhood trauma, miserable job, moment of self discovery, episode of debauchery, pathologic ambition, loyal pet, neglected spouse, personal demons and years of boring hard work. They forgot the tenth, the one involving a lifetime of being skint.

Going through the list, you might find yourself nodding — endless gruesome jobs from which you are routinely fired, followed by a clanging moment aged 27 when you realise you would rather die on the dole than ever show up again at a place where people have titles to tell you how important they are, and get massively het up over bits of paper so abstract they might as well be made of clouds.