Writer B was a dedicated hobby-writer. Probably he didn’t attempt a career in writing because he could make a decent living as a librarian, surrounded by books, which he loved.
Like Writer A, Writer B was an encyclopedic reader and thinker. He was always connecting ideas, and after he retired, he began work on a novel he’d been incubating for most of his adult life.
Writer B and I had many conversations about his creative process. More than once, he admonished both of us, “If an idea strikes, write it down immediately, word-for-word, because it will never come back in the pristine form it first arrived in.”
He reported that his best poems and stories had come to him in just this way—a lightning strike; a moment of perfection in which the only difficulty was to capture it. I was impressed and somewhat envious until I began to see that these bolts of brilliance were a mixed blessing to Writer B.
A Case of Brilliance 