The Good Doctor
By Neil SimonThe Writer, a character based on Anton Chekhov, sits in his study. He talks directly to the audience.
THE WRITER:
It's quite all right, you're not disturbing me... I would much rather talk than work. Yet here I am, day after day, haunted by one thought: I must write, I must write, I must write... This is my study, the room in which I write my stories. I built it myself, actually. Cutted the timber and fitted the logs. Made an awful mess of it. I do my writing here at the side of the room because the roof leaks directly over my desk. I'd move the desk, but it covers a hole I left in the floor. And the floor was built on the side of a hill, so, in heavy rains, the room tends to slide downhill. Many's the day I've stood in this cabin and passed my neighbors standing in the road.
Still, I'm happy here. Although I don't get enough visitors to suit me. People tend to shy away from writers. They assume we're always thinking - not true. Even my dear, sweet mother doesn't like to disturb me, so she always tiptoes up here and leaves my food outside the door. I haven't had a hot meal in years...
But I've done a good deal of writing in here... Perhaps too much. I look out the window and think, life is passing me at a furious rate. So I ask myself the question; What force is it that compels me to write so incessantly, day after day, page after page, story after story? And the answer is quite simple: I have no choice. I am a writer.
Sometimes I think I may be mad... Oh, I'm quite harmless. But I do admit to fits of wandering. I'm engaged in conversations where I hear nothing and see only the silent movement of lips, and answer a meaningless, "Yes, yes of course." And all the while I'm thinking, "He'll make a wonderful character for a story, this one."
Still, while I'm writing, I enjoy it. And I like reading the proofs but... as soon as it appears in print, I can't bear it. I see that it is all wrong, a mistake, that it ought never to have been written, and I am miserable. Then the public reads it: "Yes, charming, clever." "Charming, but a far cry from Tolstoy." Or "A fine thing, but Turgenev's Fathers and Sons was better." And so it will be to my dying day... Charming and clever, charming and clever, nothing more. And when I die my friends will walk by my grave and say, "Here lies so and so. A good writer, but Turgenev was better."
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