Literal failure (or, Excerpts from my Autobiography, by Some Other Bloke)

He was trapped in a rut between journalism and meagre scraps of prose. Short stories were the best he could do. Very short, too short to make a living from, even if he got paid for them...

They had been amazingly fickle, his muses. Or he had been at fault for picking such unreliable ones.

- Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin