Writing to congratulate Graham Greene on the success of The End of The Affair, Evelyn Waugh marvelled at the novelist hero Bendrix being able to write 1100 - forgetting that his own Brideshead Revisited, written on leave from the army, had been knocked off in a matter of weeks. Gripped by creative frenzy, John Fowles ground out the first draft of The Collector in 1963 at 10 times this rate. Stuck in his lung sanatorium in 1948, George Orwell recorded a conversation with a fellow patient, editor of a boy's weekly magazine, whose contributors regularly turned in 40,000 words a week. Yes, Joyce genially replied. Three sentences, Joyce assured him.
Desperate circumstances can send things heroically out of kilter.
Hard-up and mentally strung out, George Gissing began New Grub Street on 1 October 1890. Despite suffering from an attack of lumbago so severe that he could not stand up, he worked from 8.30am to noon and 2pm to 6pm, completing volume one by 23 October, volume two by 15 November and the final volume on 6 December. Gissing's stimulus was merely his own inner fire. Evelyn Waugh's elder brother Alec once made the mistake of popping some benzedrine. As a 2000 words a day man, he was surprised to find himself completing 24,000 words in a week.