Breaking news. Until 3pm yesterday, Jake Wallis Simons (32), a British writer, had enjoyed a “sterling writing day.” Not only had he managed to limit his Facebook and Twitter usage to 35% of total work time, he had also managed to avoid writer’s block – or, as he likes to call it, “author’s stagnation.” As a result, he had put a full thousand words down on the page.

Then it started to go wrong. “I started editing as normal, polishing and refining here and there,” he said casually. “But then I began to find more and more flaws in the prose. Chiefly, I found a whole host of words where one would have sufficed.” This led to an orgy of deletion, which caused Simons’ word count to reduce further and further as the minutes went by. “I couldn’t stop,” explained Simons. “Everywhere I looked I saw superfluous adjectives, redundant sentences, and paragraphs that were stating the obvious. Before long, my laptop was smoking. I’m in the process of claiming on the insurance.”

According to witnesses, Simons started to mumble unintelligibly as he hunched over the screen. As his efforts became more febrile, however, he started to make Keith-Jarrett-style noises and contort his body physically. Before long, he was leaping from his chair yelping “Hemingway!” and “Carver!” before returning to type with even more ferocity.

The public library authorities, having never encountered a proper artist before, were slow to react. “It’s not that we are unaccustomed to people being noisy in the library,” said Steve (43), a librarian who claims a genetic heritage stretching back to Genghis Khan. “The days of a respect for silence and other people’s concentration are long gone. But Simons’ behaviour went way beyond anything we had experienced before.”

After a hushed conflab, Steve and his colleagues decided it would be safest to leave Simons to “blow himself out.”

“Due to health and safety, we felt unable to intervene,” he explained. “After all, what were we to know? He could have been carrying a knife.” Furthermore, he explained, the spectacle was attracting more people into the library, causing attendance to skyrocket by more than 300%.

Last night, Simons was consoling himself with a few drinks in his local pub. “I’m trying to look on the bright side,” he told reporters. “I might have only ended up with a single word, but at least I know it earned its place.” When pressed, he revealed that the fruit of the day’s labours was the definite article “The.”

“I’ve been doing some calculations,” he said, several pints later. “At this rate, I’ll have a complete novel in 273.97 years. Admittedly, that’s a long time. But at least I’ll know that every word has been properly considered. In this age of trashy fiction, that’s no small thing.” He then delivered on a slurred monologue about cryogenic suspension, which lasted long into the night.

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