The commitment not to give up is the beginning and the harbinger of literary work. Without it, what is done does not become a work, but merely something fleeting and equally disposable. It is only this commitment that will sustain the effort when circumstances sabotage it, when the will to write itself fails. It is this that motivates habit, and it is only this that restores normality when habit, violated, transmutes a state of productive inertia into absolute torpor.