The story would have to be written out of his business
hours. That meant he would have to give up his evenings to it.
But he had done this, and for nearly a week had settled himself to
his task in the quiet corner of the club at eight o'clock, and
held to it resolutely until twelve.
The first two chapters had run off his pen with delightful ease.
The third came harder; the events and incidents of the story
became confused and contradictory; the character of Billy Isham
obstinately refused to take the prominent place which Condy had
designed for him; and with the beginning of the fourth chapter,
Condy had finally come to know the enormous difficulties, the
exasperating complications, the discouragements that begin anew
with every paragraph, the obstacles that refuse to be surmounted,
and all the pain, the labor, the downright mental travail and
anguish that fall to the lot of the writer of novels.
To write a short story with the end in plain sight from the
beginning was an easy matter compared to the upbuilding, grain by
grain, atom by atom, of the fabric of "In Defiance of Authority."
Condy soon found that there was but one way to go about the
business. He must shut his eyes to the end of his novel--that
far-off, divine event--and take his task chapter by chapter, even
paragraph by paragraph; grinding out the tale, as it were, by main
strength, driving his pen from line to line, hating the effort,
happy only with the termination of each chapter, and working away,
hour by hour, minute by minute, with the dogged, sullen, hammer-
and-tongs obstinacy of the galley-slave, scourged to his daily
toil.
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