"Why don’t you drink your wine? It’s sitting right there, for Christ’s sake. Some of us can’t drink wine, we don’t have that privilege, but you can, so why the heck don’t you do it?"

That's what Stephen King almost walked over and said to 2 old ladies who were sitting near him in a restaurant about 27 years ago, not long after he gave up drinking for good. The ladies were allowing their "half-finished glasses of white wine" to sit "forgotten in the middle of the table" while they carried on an animated conversation.

He's reminded of that when he thinks about the way Donna Tartt — a great writer — has only written 3 books and Jonathan Franzen — also great — has only written 5.

The long gaps between books from such gifted writers make me... crazy.... As a young man, my head was like a crowded movie theater where someone has just yelled “Fire!” and everyone scrambles for the exits at once. I had a thousand ideas but only 10 fingers and one typewriter. There were days — I’m not kidding about this, or exaggerating — when I thought all the clamoring voices in my mind would drive me insane. Back then, in my 20s and early 30s, I thought often of the John Keats poem that begins, “When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain …”