Was it Thomas Mann or another German who defined a writer as someone for whom writing was difficult?

I don’t have any such thing as “personal dreams of a brave new world” when it comes to my fiction. I just about make a living from writing – largely business work for corporate and publishing clients – and I honestly think the two (fact and fiction, if you like) can co-exist. You have to be a pragmatist to write these days. Premium content works if you’re the Economist, but why would I try to restrict access to my stories any more than I would to my blog? If one person reads something on my site and likes it enough to order a book, it has served its purpose. The reader, ultimately, counts. My site is just a vehicle for these words while someone else is paying for others. It’s a business model creative people have been using for centuries, and that’s probably the only sense in which I see it as being flawed.

Was it Thomas Mann or another German who defined a writer as someone for whom writing was difficult?

I don’t have any such thing as “personal dreams of a brave new world” when it comes to my fiction. I just about make a living from writing – largely business work for corporate and publishing clients – and I honestly think the two (fact and fiction, if you like) can co-exist. You have to be a pragmatist to write these days. Premium content works if you’re the Economist, but why would I try to restrict access to my stories any more than I would to my blog? If one person reads something on my site and likes it enough to order a book, it has served its purpose. The reader, ultimately, counts. My site is just a vehicle for these words while someone else is paying for others. It’s a business model creative people have been using for centuries, and that’s probably the only sense in which I see it as being flawed.