Politics & Power Quote by David Eddings

Self-mythology, punctured with a pin. Eddings opens by painting the monkish fantasy of the writer’s life: predawn discipline, work finished before the world is even awake. It’s the kind of routine that flatters the American cult of productivity, the idea that real accomplishment happens while everyone else is sleeping. Then he swerves. The “unholy hour” already hints at comic exaggeration, but the real punchline is anatomical: a “slightly bad back” as a causal engine of national letters.

The intent is slyly double. On one level, it’s a brag disguised as complaint: he writes so much, so early, that his body has begun to protest. On another, it’s a refusal to romanticize inspiration. He doesn’t credit muse or genius; he credits inconvenience. The bad back is a practical constraint that shoves him out of bed and into the chair, turning pain and insomnia into output. That’s a very workmanlike view of art, and it lands because it undercuts the grand narratives writers are expected to tell about themselves.

The subtext is also about aging and endurance. “Slightly” minimizes what’s likely chronic, while “enormous contribution” mock-inflates his legacy. The oscillation between understatement and hyperbole is the joke’s engine, letting him claim importance without sounding self-serious.

Context matters: Eddings was a prolific, deadline-friendly fantasy novelist, closer to a craftsman with a steady production line than a tortured literary hermit. The line reads like a backstage confession from someone who knows the business runs on routine, not revelation.