Always there, never there

You will have to face the fact that, as a writer, you will be a difficult if not a maddening person to live with.

John Mortimer, Where There's a Will

Why are writers so hard to live with? Because they are always there — and because they are never there.

Some writers may go to a coffee shop or a library to write, but most of them write at home. If there's a spouse who works outside the home, this may never be a problem. But some spouses are home most of the time, and there may be children. Everyone must keep quiet because the writer is working. And this writer does not want to be disturbed during working hours, usually the morning, whether by phone calls, a ringing doorbell, children at play, a clogged drain that needs immediate attention or whatever else may be going on.

Hilda and Horace Rumpole in the TV series

So the writer in the family may be there, yet inaccessible. Close by, yet distant.

And when the writer is not actually writing? John Mortimer says this in his book Where There's a Will: "The writer is seldom entirely involved in any situation. Some part of him is standing aside, the detached observer." Writers, or at least writers of fiction, are more interested in being observers than participants. They are always looking for material. How do people talk? How do people act in certain situations? What interesting development might prove useful in a novel?

"This is deeply frustrating to those in need of a fully committed love affair, or even a completely meaningful quarrel," he writes.

Mortimer, author of the Rumpole stories, may not be entirely joking when saying that when his wife is angry about about something, he is not so much listening to what she is saying as "memorizing her dialogue so that I may give extracts from it to Hilda Rumpole in one of her many disagreements with her fictional husband."