Why do writers like Bill Bryson and others stop writing?

In news that was greeted with consternation by his army of devoted fans, Bill Bryson recently announced that he was going to stop writing. “The world is full of lots of other things you could do that are enjoyable,” he said, “without any of the pressures that come with trying to do these things as a job”.

While this is dismaying for readers anticipating another one of his funny and informative titles to curl up with, Bryson is hardly the only writer to have entertained such views. In 2012, when he was 79, Philip Roth famously announced that he was putting aside his pen. It was a decision he stuck to till his death six years later.

“Enough is enough!” he said at the time. “I no longer feel this fanaticism to write that I have experienced in my life.” Such dwindling of powers is what Martin Amis also darkly referred to with the publication of Inside Story earlier this year, which he called his “last big novel”.

He went on: “Any novelist beyond 70 is haunted by the question — when do I stop?” One reason, according to him, is that “your vocabulary starts to shrink at 65-70 — it’s universal and ominous”.

Even at a younger age, some novelists feel that they’ve simply run out of things to say. In 2014, after the publication of The Book of Strange New Things, his sixth novel, the 54-year-old Michael Faber announced: “I think I have written the things I was put on earth to write. I think I've reached the limit.” However, he did clarify that this didn’t apply to short stories and poetry – and last month came the publication of his children’s fantasy, A Tale of Two Worlds.

For Dashiell Hammett, writer of hard-boiled detective fiction, the decision to stop was made when he realised that he was tired of repeating himself. He stopped after his fifth novel, the classic The Thin Man, published when he was 39. Years later, he commented: “It is the beginning of the end when you discover that you have a style.”

In passing, this didn’t deter P.G. Wodehouse who cheerfully continued not just with his distinctive style, but also recycled plots. As he wrote in the introduction to Summer Moonshine: “A certain critic…made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names’…With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneraled the man by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.”

Then, there was the restless, anarchic Arthur Rimbaud. A prolific and immensely influential poet from his early teens, he renounced verse when he was just 21. For the rest of his comparatively short life, he ventured on foot across the Alps, joined the Dutch colonial army, visited Egypt, and traded coffee and guns in Ethiopia. As one of his phrases has it: “I stretched out ropes from spire to spire; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.”

More prosaic is the case of writers afflicted by what’s come to be known as Second Novel Syndrome. Perhaps the best example of this is Ralph Ellison. It’s not that he stopped writing altogether; after the rapturous reception of his debut, Invisible Man, he became obsessed with grand ambitions for his next novel, titled Juneteenth.

At over 2,000 pages it was still incomplete when he died in 1994, although a 368-page version painstakingly stitched together by literary executor John Callahan was published five years later. It’s impossible to know whether this was the form Ellison would have decided on.

There are other cases of extreme writer’s block. Coleridge wrote most of the work he is known for in his twenties, and then scribbled notebook entries lamenting his inactivity. Joseph Mitchell wrote frequent and admired portraits for The New Yorker after he joined in 1938, but stopped publishing completely with the publication of Joe Gould’s Secret in 1964. Nevertheless, he continued to arrive at the magazine’s office every day till his death 32 years later.

Social pressure can also, alas, play a role. After Perumal Murugan’s Madhorubhagan – translated into English as One Part Woman -- was met with continual protests by right-wing groups in 2015, he announced his decision to stop writing: “Perumal Murugan, the writer is dead…Leave him alone.” Fortunately, he returned from this literary exile in 2018 with Poonachi, or The Story of a Black Goat. At the time, he said, “I realised during that traumatic period that writing is my outlet and the tool for expression at the deepest possible level”.

This need to express is a powerful motivation. Though Alice Munro has in the past indicated that she doesn’t know whether she has the energy to carry on writing, in an interview after her Nobel Prize win when she was 82, she said, “Every day I have mixed messages to myself over whether I will retire. I have promised to retire but now and then I get an idea.”

Munro, and others like her, can feel compelled to capture ideas and experiences in words. In his last poem, What is the Word, composed in the hospital room in which he spent his final days, Samuel Beckett obsessed over searching for the word that was “afaint afar away over there”. He seemed to glimpse it even though it was “a folly given all this”. The rest is silence.

Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.