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I read this short story more than 30 years ago, in a collection of Fantasy and SF. It is not SF so it must be fantasy.

It is about a writer who used to be prolific but now has failed to give his editor what the latter is expecting. So, since it must be Fantasy, IIRC, the editor got help from some imp, or demon or whatever. Otherwise there would be no Fantasy aspect at all.

Anyway the writer is now locked in a room with ink constantly flowing into it. His only way to keep from drowning is to keep writing, very fast, in order to use more ink than what flows in. This is totally ridiculous since however fast his imagination allows him to write, doodling would be faster, to say nothing of dropping paper directly into the ink to absorb it.

But the way the author writes it is better than my synopsis, and it really gives an amusing story.

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    Do you recall if the writer in the story was a writer of science fiction and fantasy?
    – user14111
    Commented Aug 18 at 4:53
  • Did it feel like a very old story, perhaps written when authors commonly wrote with pen and ink?
    – user14111
    Commented Aug 18 at 5:02
  • @user14111 I think the writer was indeed in the field of SF&F. As for writing in pen and ink, that was the situation he was put in. I don't think the context was so old that old-fashioned ribbon typewriters did not exist. But probably old enough that these were the only typewriters (and not available to the writer in his prison.) I mean, there were editors of SF&F magazines.
    – Alfred
    Commented Aug 18 at 5:48
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    Many SF stories about SF writers are liisted at the Recursive Science Fiction site. Searching that site for the word "ink" I didn't find anything that looked like your story, but maybe I missed something. If the story were written by the likes of Asimov I'm sure someone would have identified it by now, so I guess it's by some less famous writer.
    – user14111
    Commented Aug 19 at 6:04
  • 1
    I wouldn't draw that conclusion. The Recursive SF site has collected many such stories, but I bet they are still missing quite a few.
    – user14111
    Commented Aug 19 at 16:41

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