We now return to our regularly scheduled programming

Getting back to it.

• Joshua Ferris looks into the importance of work in literature in The Guardian.

Ferris, the author of the current talk-of-the-literati workplace novel Then We Came to the End, gets in some good observations. You might almost consider this a commentary track for his book:

Work, then - broadly defined - is central to literature. Don Quixote goes headlong into the windmill - what is the noble fool doing but his misguided work? Work puts Ishmael on the Pequod. Work brings Esther to Bleak House and sends Humbert Humbert to the house on Lawn Street. Work defines the plot and central moral conceit of Ian McEwan's Saturday. Work as wayward scientific inquiry prompts Tyrone Slothrop's erections during the Blitz and forces him out into the Zone in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, while work as blind loyalty reveals the trouble with blind loyalty in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. These examples highlight how vocation in literature is never happenstance, never half-hearted decision-making, but artfully premeditated and always purposeful. Work does work in every great book - even if just to allow the characters enough leisure time to pursue the main drama.

As strategically and thematically smart as Fitzgerald is when assigning vocations to his characters - vocations that aid and abet by professional title the novel's personal drama - he nevertheless keeps work-related matters topical. It is the nature of the work, not the work itself, that informs. A different story arises when a writer chooses to go deeper into work, to turn work into one of literature's main characters.

Wrestling with Charles Dickens

• Simon Gray discusses the difficulty of writing a play about Charles Dickens in The Guardian.

Like I say -- nothing that's worthwhile is ever easy.

I had never before in my writing life accepted money for work not yet done. I'd like to think that this behaviour came from some sort of principle, a high-minded belief that inspiration would be poisoned by commerce. But then why have I always been so envious of fellow playwrights who not only accept commissions but ask for them, and, when they've got them, announce them to all who care to listen, and many who don't? Perhaps it's because I know that's what real playwrights do: even Shakespeare accepted commissions, though as far as I can make out they were mainly from himself.

The fact is, I have difficulty in thinking of myself as a playwright. On those official forms where you have to put down your occupation, I clung to "lecturer" for years after I'd retired. Now I write "writer" in a loose sort of way, with a little gap between the i and the t, connected by a squiggle. Wri~ter.

I can't write when I'm afraid to write. When I force myself I become self-conscious, which is worse than not writing, as it makes me feel ashamed, and bogus. On the other hand, not writing makes me feel stolen from - but by whom or what? Time, perhaps. I decided to give up on the play for a while, get stuck into something else.