101 Reasons to Stop Writing

In 373, Athanasius of Alexandria met the author of his favorite book. He is thought to be the first bishop to determine the list of books that would eventually become the canonical New Testament, leaving out the Gospel of Judas, which they never finished editing (for plot inconsistencies), and the lesser known Gospel of St. Trinians.

In 1519, Leonardo da Vinci stopped writing, drawing, painting, sculpting, inventing, observing, experimenting and philosophising. The world’s most famous lefty and arguably the most successful unpublished science fiction writer, Leonardo left behind only 15 paintings but 13,000 pages of notes, drawings, a really excellent recipe for pesto, and a sketch for a distributed network of information retrieval devices he labelled “la Internetta”. There are university alumni who collectively have less talent. Until all human knowledge is reset to zero, no-one will ever be this good again.

And three dreadful writers who won’t be missed:

• In 1945, Martin Bormann held the title of Germany’s Biggest Asshole for two days. He is widely credited with reinventing the genre now known as “Dictator Slash”, with his posthumously published collections entitled My Dark Days in the Bunker and Hitler’s End.
• In 1957, Senator Joseph McCarthy finally stopped making shit up about Communists in the State Department, succumbing to cirrhosis, hepatitis and a terminal case of hyperbole. It’s only recently come to light that for many years he wrote bondage-laden erotica under the pseudonym “Rex Longfellow”.
• In 1972, J. Edgar Hoover stopped claiming that “there is no such thing as organized crime fiction in America”. He reportedly died during a private screening of The Godfather. His four novels featuring a gay FBI agent called Gee Mann were universally rejected by publishers as “unrealistic”, and remain unpublished. On his deathbed, he is alleged to have claimed he was a ghostwriter for Mickey Spillane.