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In contrast to the stance many of us take from time to time, one of the biographers of Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “When a temporary illness lays him on his back, he writes in bed one of his most careful and thoughtful papers, the discourse on ‘The Technical Elements in Style.’  When ophthalmia confines him to a darkened room, he writes by the diminished light.  When, after hemorrhage, his right hand has to be held in a sling, he writes some of his ‘Child’s Garden’ with his left hand.  When the hemorrhage has been so bad that he dare not speak, he dictates a novel in the deaf and dumb alphabet.”

John Gipson, Little Rock, Arkansas