Nicolas Mahler on Writers’ Struggles with Motivation  Writing Whiners

The Viennese comic artist Nicolas Mahler illustrates a selection of quotations by well-known writers that offer insights into their inner lives. It is a litany of complaints and lamentations about the hardships of their profession.

The comic artist and illustrator Nicolas Mahler has already turned works by famous authors such as Thomas Bernhard, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil and Marcel Proust into comics. In Ach die dumme Literatur! (Oh, this silly literature!) he has now compiled various quotations from writers describing what a backbreaking job writing is.

Self-doubt and fantasies of immortality, procrastination and bursts of creative frenzy, financial and alcohol problems – no one writes as vividly and expansively about the difficulty, and at times the futility, of human existence as writers. Writer’s block comes as an added extra on top!

Writing Rabble

Mahler quotes well-known figures such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, E.M. Cioran, Marguerite Duras, Max Frisch, Peter Handke, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Friederike Mayröcker and Marcel Proust from diaries, letters and other texts.

They complain about physical strains – for instance Hesse about a stiff neck caused by long hours of sitting, or the “disgust at the typewriter” (Max Frisch) – but even more so about mental and emotional hardship. Kafka captures the pressure to perform and the inability to do so perfectly: “Dreadful. Wrote nothing today. No time tomorrow.”

Relations among them are, naturally, not always good. Joyce and Musil both lived in Zurich for a time, yet “made no effort to get to know each other”. Proust cannot stand Oscar Wilde, Handke has no desire to speak with Beckett, and for Thomas Bernhard his fellow writers are “writing rabble”.

Madhouse Book Fair

The pitfalls and darker sides of the literary world are also taken to task. Bernhard complains at length about his meagre royalties, even though he claims money means nothing to him. The challenge of agreeing on a book cover even extends to its colour scheme: “Under no circumstances violet, as it brings bad luck,” Bachmann writes to the Suhrkamp publisher Siegfried Unseld. At least here she agrees with Max Frisch, who “cannot stand purple as a colour”. Sales figures are also discussed, though Arno Schmidt retorts to popular success: “You can never become a great writer.” Readings seem to be sheer torture for many: “Even the thought of them makes my legs tremble – and not only my legs,” writes Beckett. As for book fairs, Arno Schmidt finds them “very odd (and disgracefully madhouse-like! …)”.

On every other page there is a cartoon illustrating one of the sometimes unintentionally comical notes in Mahler’s typical style: very minimalist, yet still expressive and funny. Bernhard appears as Scrooge McDuck on his way to his money vault, while Kafka lies on a sofa with a dog resting on his stomach; the author recorded a corresponding “repulsive” dream in his diary, “a paw close to my face”. Upon waking, Kafka “remained afraid for a while to open my eyes and look at it”.

Max Frisch poses the ultimate question, one that extends beyond writers: “Do I have to have something to say?” And if one does have something to say – and above all has written it – when is a book actually finished? That is, of course, for the author to decide. Yet for Friederike Mayröcker, completing a work achieves no real goal: “The text, in its nameless twitching movement, ends here, I say; it has led nowhere, yet it has never come to rest.”

May 2026