But you have to know just how far to go too far...and the bit that was exercising the trio right up until the opening was a chunk in which Ronald Reagan, an amiable puppet uttering lines apparently written by Samuel Beckett, was failing to recall the least thing about a missile deal with Iran.
For years he's been trying, and failing, to write about coincidence.
In those struggling years when I was trying and failing to write, I did start books about the miner's strike or French political prisoners in the 1870s – that one sounds like a Booker prize winner even as I say it.
When not obsessing jealously about his contemporaries' success and applying for any job that might get him out, he's grappling with a study of failure, a project he thinks might best be honoured by failing to write it.
When the story opens, he's trying — and failing — to write a second book.
I was trying, and largely failing, to write at night, on weekends, and on my two weeks of holidays per year.
Today's dramatists are failing to confront issues of injustice, writing instead "for attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts", leading political playwright Athol Fugard has said.
In Monday's Guardian, political playwright Athol Fugard voiced a concern that dramatists are "failing to confront issues of injustice, writing instead for attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts".
"We find it extraordinary that it should be Germany, of all countries, that is failing to learn from history," they wrote, referring to a 1930s banking crisis that led to the breakdown of democracy in Europe and the rise of the Nazis.
