So burdened was he by the expectations that his accomplishments had generated in readers and publishers by the 1920s, so unable to author works such as the 1907 novels The Tanners or The Assistant with the determinedness that rendered revision nearly unnecessary (and which his confident penmanship embodied), that he developed a new writing system. Having “fearfully, hideously hated his pen” he went from delivering his sparkling fiction in copperplate handwriting to jotting miniatures in pencil on trimmed-to-size, assorted scraps: tax forms, calendars, business correspondence, clippings, penny dreadfuls, and the like, with which his scribbles were often in dialogue. Relishing his newly acquired outsider status, so to speak, and free from the publishing pressures he’d by then internalized, he found that these messier and playful fragments were reviving in him an otherwise waning “writerly enthusiasm.”