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Personal Archives Reveal Douglas Adams Found Writing Torturous (theguardian.com) 86

Posted by BeauHD from the note-to-self dept.
New submitter dkoneill writes: A soon-to-be-released, crowdfunded book based on the personal archives of Douglas Adams (author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, episodes of Doctor Who and other beloved science fiction), reveals that he occasionally found writing torturous. In a "General note to myself" the author states, "Writing isn't so bad really when you get through the worry. Forget about the worry, just press on. Don't be embarrassed about the bad bits. Don't strain at them." "Writing can be good...You can get pleasure out of it."

His sister Jane responded to the General note, "I love it, but I just wish he'd read it to himself more often. I think it [writing] was a tortuous process for him, not all the time, but when it was difficult for him it was really difficult." When stuck, the author would even tear down his own work. On another page of notes, he wrote, "Arthur Dent is a burk. He does not interest me. Ford Prefect is a burk. He does not interest me. Zaphod Beeblebrox is a burk. He does not interest me. Marvin is a burk. He does not interest me. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a burk. It does not interest me."
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Personal Archives Reveal Douglas Adams Found Writing Torturous More

Personal Archives Reveal Douglas Adams Found Writing Torturous

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  • and I don't care, because even though I seriously experience an emotional rollercoaster ride that can last years until I succeed and my work is finally out, it's worth it. A product with the quality I want can only be completed with this unavoidable torture. Life is tough, and it's also wonderful. Also, the shoulders of giants on which we stand never would have existed without them going through a whole lot of torture to achieve what they did.

  • Torturous, tortuous (Score:5, Insightful)

    by XXongo ( 3986865 ) on Monday March 22, 2021 @09:33PM (#61187736) Homepage
    Which?

    The headline says "Douglas Adams found writing torturous", but the summary gives this: [His sister Jane said] "I love it, but I just wish he'd read it to himself more often. I think it [writing] was a tortuous process for him".'

    I almost think that the writer doesn't know that torturous (painful) and tortuous (full of twists and turns) are two different words.

    • The intricacy of a word is in poetry but the modern article writer just produces overtly biased drivel.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xenx ( 2211586 )
      There is a very sound argument that the use of torturous in the article isn't at all related to his sister's use of the word tortuous. It could easily be a mistake between the two words, but the way he worded things in some of the snippets could easily be considered torturous. Like the general note to himself, it implies he sometimes feels those negative things while writing. I would expect a decent number of authors torture themselves over their writing at times.

    • Why aren't you helping?
      It lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.
      Why is that?

    • I almost think that the writer doesn't know that torturous (painful) and tortuous (full of twists and turns) are two different words.

      I'll let you know about your torturous theory just as soon as I figure out WTF a burk is.

    • That's what you get if you start an improbability drive in the neighborhood of a slashdot summary.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jeremyp ( 130771 )

      It is torturous for me to read other people's tortuous code.

      It may actually be that the quote contains the spelling mistake. Adams was infamous for allowing deadlines to woosh by. I suspect that writing was often not a pleasant process for him.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      I almost think that the writer doesn't know that torturous (painful) and tortuous (full of twists and turns) are two different words.

      Thank you! I was dimly aware of the two but didn't really know the difference. Your explanation is perfect.

    • The original was "tortoise". Which explains everything.

  • Work is Work thats why they pay you. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by lister king of smeg ( 2481612 ) on Monday March 22, 2021 @09:42PM (#61187750)

    Work is boring painful and something no one wants to do that is why they pay us to do it. Just because you ar egood at you job doesn't mean you enjoy it. Writing is just work for authors the only difference is they get to drink on the job.

    • It depends. Isaac Asimov enjoyed writing so much he took his typewriter with him on his honeymoon.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fazig ( 2909523 )
      Ah, the good old drivel that justifies any work place being run like an inhumane hellhole being totally fine and justified.

      And I don't fully disagree. Work often isn't pleasant. If it was, probably more people would be willing to do it and subsequently it wouldn't pay as much.
      But that isn't always the case when it comes down to the individual.
      Some people actually enjoy their work. Now you might disagree with the definition of work here loosely after what is attributed to Confusius (intentional) as 'Choos

      • Ah, the good old drivel that justifies any work place being run like an inhumane hellhole being totally fine and justified.

        And I don't fully disagree. Work often isn't pleasant. If it was, probably more people would be willing to do it and subsequently it wouldn't pay as much.

        I never said working in a inhuman hellhole is fine or justifiable. I was saying that work is not something we want to do it sucks its onerous and that's why they pay us.

        a workplace being any worse than it needs to be is unjustifiable and cause to find another employer or demand pay-raise or other compensation until such time that the payment outweighs the misery.

    • the only difference is they get to drink on the job.

      Thanks to Covid-19 and work-from-home, many more of us can enjoy that perk.

  • Makes me love him even more (Score:3)

    by Plugh ( 27537 ) on Monday March 22, 2021 @10:13PM (#61187816) Homepage
    Self-loathing, straining at his own limitations... not a drop of narcissism or false modesty.

  • Dumbed down Dr Who (Score:3)

    by aberglas ( 991072 ) on Monday March 22, 2021 @10:32PM (#61187848)

    I heard somewhere that he made his living writing Dr Who, but had to dumb down all his ideas. Dr Who plots stopped being interesting to me when I turned about 7. They are awful.

    And then, unconstrained, he produced that gem. Hitchhikers.

    What would Dr Who have been like if not constrained by Bureaucrats? Probably not much better. Hitchhikers (Season 1) was his Magnus Opus. Season 2 was weak. The Detective Agency was good though.

    But to produce just one work like Hitchhikers is enough.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      And here I am after all these years still not understanding what is supposed to be so great about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
      I, too, found the protagonist(s) to be completely uninteresting, which made it very hard to read to the points where he depicted genius in his completely surprising... hell I don't even know what the right word is to describe the parts where something absolutely questionable, over the top and weird happened that made you think.

      This story was painful to read for me. Just as t

      • And here I am after all these years still not understanding what is supposed to be so great about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

        I felt compelled to read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and it felt like a chore. In my opinion this book is extremely overrated. The story is not very good and the humor is based on absurdity. So the planet is really controlled by mice, and they built a giant supercomputer to answer the question to life, the universe, and everything, and the answer is 42...
        Is that funny? Maybe for a six year old.
        The book is mostly dumb, absurd and not very well written.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jeremyp ( 130771 )

          Funnily enough, I had very similar feelings about the Lord of the Rings (except for the humour part, because it hasn't got any) and yet a lot of people think it is a masterpiece. Maybe it's just that your tastes differ from other people's.

          Anyway, what's wrong with humour based on absurdity? Some of the greatest humour ever is based on it. Think of knights wandering around the landscape followed by squires banging coconuts together, or an autopilot that is an inflatable doll that needs a literal blow job.

          • I still haven't read LOTR, but I believe the books are considered greats, not because they are particularly exciting to read, but because they were the first to introduce the concept of "high fantasy" to the world, in an epic novel with detailed world building and background, such as the various cultures and landscapes that are described in minute detail. So even without having read the books, I know that there is a huge history and background in the LOTR's world, so the books definitely excelled in some ar

          • Anyway, what's wrong with humour based on absurdity? Some of the greatest humour ever is based on it. Think of knights wandering around the landscape followed by squires banging coconuts together, or an autopilot that is an inflatable doll that needs a literal blow job.

            Nothing wrong with it, if it's done in a particularly absurd way that somehow tickles the intellect. But somehow the comedy in THHGTDG didn't do it for me. Maybe at some point you do grow out of it to some extent. Or maybe you have to be British to get it.

            I do remember I was literally rolling on the floor laughing when I saw Monthy Python films as a kid. As a grown up, it still gets a chuckle out of me know and then, but it isn't anywhere near as fun as I remember it anymore.

            • Humor films never are as good the second time, because humor relies on unexpected twists.

            • My take on it is that absurdist humor stops being funny when what was put forward as absurd no longer seems so absurd. Take the Dead Parrot sketch for example:

              Who would be so brazenly fraudulent as to sell a dead parrot nailed to a perch as a live bird? Who would be so stupid as to actually fall for that fraud? Who would defend their having committed such fraud so vociferously when presented with the evidence and try to insist that the parrot is actually still alive?

              Now think about some of the Politicians t

      • Agreed. I guess I made the mistake of reading Stanislaw Lem first, some of his stories really ripped my sides out while being also interesting as serious sci-fi. Compared to those, Hitchhiker's Guide was bland on many levels.

        I recall that the Hitchhiker's Guide was originally a radio play, which might explain why it doesn't work so well as a book, especially if you're expecting science fiction. I've also enjoyed TV adaptations such as the two separate Dirk Gently series, which are not exactly sci-fi eith

        • Hitchhikers was indeed a radio play, broadcast on the BBC in the 70s. It's target audience was a subset of the British middle class intelligencia (BBC listeners). The surprise isn't that some Americans don't like/get it. It's that some do. So much of the humour must be lost in translation.

          • The Hitchhikers radio play was brilliant. Nobody should read the book. Not many stories start with the end of the earth, (preceded by the end of Dent's home). The Vogan poetry. The infinite improbability drive. The mice. Deep Thought and the philosopher's union!! The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Sure, a lot of these ideas had been floating around, but Adams put them together very well. But you have to be moderately educated/intelligent to appreciate them.

            There was something called Dirk Gen

            • I totally agree with everything you said. And just to be clear, I wasn't dissing THHGTTG, just trying to supply context. I'm a big fan - I own the radio plays on CD, have the books and even have a disk somewhere with the TV show (let's not talk about the movie) - but I'm a middle class Brit who was alive in 70s, so I'm pretty much target audience (I even owned a digital watch).

              I also like Dirk Gently (the books). :)

  • Deadlines.

    • Famously, Adams said "I love deadlines; I love the sound they make as they whizz by."

      • And he said it in the early eighties - if not earlier - in an interview about the H2G2 radio series which was being prepared for the TV series at the time. That DNA struggled with writing stopped being new to those outside his immediate circles hasn't been news since then.
  • I found his writing tortuous.

  • Just a quick explanation for anybody wondering about Adams' use of the word, "burk". It's the alternate spelling of an English term meaning jackass. Well, worse than jackass, actually. In all its unabbreviated glory, it would be "Berkeley Hunt", which is rhyming slang for...well, I'm sure you can work it out.

  • Oh, torturous! I read the caption and thought that he had found a tortoise that could write and had kept that a secret. Thanks for waking me up Slashdot!

  • Spending my 42nd birthday with DNA (Score:3)

    by Funksaw ( 636954 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @01:54AM (#61188138)
    Just by coincidence, I live in Highgate in London, *literally* neighboring Highgate Cemetary in London where Douglas Adams (and Karl Marx) are buried. Visiting graveyards alone is a socially acceptable activity during lockdown (if a bit morbid), but as it so happens next week is my 42nd birthday. I already booked tickets, and on my 42nd birthday I'll be spending at least some of the time with Douglas Adams. If I can't spend time with alive people, I at least hope that wherever he is -- or isn't -- or will haven en been -- DNA would appreciate the gesture. I will be bringing a towel, naturally. If it's not too morbid or tacky, I'm hoping that I can get a selfie.

  • In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

    Who

  • The original was the radio series, and much as I love the books...in my opinion the radio series was and is better. Particularly when you get to the later books.

    The characters were brought alive by the cast. So much of it wouldn't have worked as well without that cast. In my opinion, it didn't work as well without the cast. In no way am I saying the books are bad - far from it, I think they're superb. I just find the radio series to be untouchable. Douglas Adams seemed to need a foil to bounce off, and w

    • Both are better than the 2005 movie. Even the TV miniseries is better than that. It was like a clipshow of random bits and pieces of the book, not tied together in
      any way and missing most of the punchlines they were leading up to.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mccalli ( 323026 )
        Haven't seen it, deliberately. Didn't look anything like HHGttH to me, so skipped out. However, I do like what Josh Talbot did with Journey of the Sorcerer [youtube.com] theme, must admit.

        • Haven't seen it, deliberately. Didn't look anything like HHGttH to me, so skipped out. However, I do like what Josh Talbot did with Journey of the Sorcerer [youtube.com] theme, must admit.

          You do reallise none of the official HHGttG version published by Adams are the same? The books are different from the radio play which is different from the television show and the movie the infocom text adventure game, the audio drama on LP, the stages shows all were different. Not just dialog and prose but whole plot points changed. To say that the you aren't watching the movie because its different is silly as all of version made directly by Adams are different from each other too.

          • There was a TV series that I saw bits of. It looked like they were acting to the original radio play sound track, which would have been clever.

            But the radio play was magic because it left things to your imagination. The shore flowing back and forth while the sea stayed still etc.

            • The colour was better on the radio show than the TV series (let's just agree to not mention the movie), while the sound effects in the book (being provided by the inside of your head, without any analogue audio stage) are far better than on the radio.

              I suspect the print quality inside DNA's drunkenly spinning brain in a field near Innsbruck was better than on the actors' scripts for the radio play.

              It's not always like that, but it's not uncommon. That's what (for example) Peter Jackson had to struggle ag

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Megane ( 129182 )
                Tom Bombadil could have taken a movie on his own, at least judging by how much they inflated The Hobbit into a trilogy. And there's other representations of that world as well; the LOTRO MMO is quite detailed in its own way by having large seamless world areas. (though sometimes it feels a bit like being The Doctor in how you can experience things out of order, and Moria was clearly flattened from three layers for sanity purposes as you can tell by the big stair)
                • If I were CRRT's literary agent (I think he still holds a lot of the rights), I'd be looking towards another series of The Silmarillion. (Elder days ; Morgoth' theft; early years ; Unnumbered Tears (I can't remember how to spell it in Quenya) with Beren & Luthien ; Earendil and defeat of Morgoth), another one for the Numenoreans and Second Age. Than a tie-up one with viewing the Ainu in Middle Earth from their point of view, including the Wizards, Bombadil, and maybe ... Arrgh - I've forgotten the Smith

  • Writing (Score:3)

    by swm ( 171547 ) <swmcd@world.std.com> on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @07:55AM (#61188688) Homepage

    Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
    --Gene Fowler

    There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.
    --Terry Pratchett

  • I thought we had a fairly clear understanding of how Douglass felt about writing when he was pushed to write So Long And Thanks For All The Fish in '84...

  • While both Pratchett and Adams have the same writing style superficially, you can see that Pratchett is putting his soul into his work while Adams just attempts to sound smart.

  • ALL professional writers find writing difficult at times. It's only the amateurs and part-timers who seem to think it's easy.

    Probably the same can be said of anybody in any field where they're making their living off it and quality matters.

  • My current book is a headache at the moment. Outlining was easy. Fast through framework was easy. Providing the detail in three places is pure tedium.

    In other words, not news at all.

  • The whole "Arthur/Zaphod/Ford are burks" rant made me think of "Mostly Harmless", the fifth book in the H2G2 trilogy. It's an unexpectedly depressing book, with about the most depressing ending one could possibly imagine. In the words of one reviewer, "the impression the reader gets is that the puppetmaster has tossed his puppets out the window in annoyance."

    Adams himself said that he was depressed when he wrote it and called the book "bleak". I imagine he might have revisited the series and tried to wri

  • Writing is a kind of therapy for me. I like putting my thoughts on paper. But I don't like to write with a pen. I usually do it at the computer and then print my stories or articles. I even bought a printer for that. By the way, guys, if you also print a lot at home, you can find cheap cartridges here https://www.mrdepot.ca/product... [mrdepot.ca].

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