There's an excellent fifty-second song by the White Stripes called 'Little Room', which goes like this:

well you're in your little room
and you're working on something good
but if it's really good
you're gonna need a bigger room
and when you're in the bigger room
you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started
sitting in your little room

It is concerned, not unobviously, with a certain kind of success, and how not only to cope with it but to sustain it, too (incidentally, note the nice shift from 'your' to 'the'). As the song appears on their third, very successful (and very good) album, White Blood Cells, the White Stripes presumably know what they're talking about. 'Little Room' might make palliative listening for writers with Second Novel Anxiety Syndrome, which appears to get worse in direct proportion to the success of a first novel - though it might simply be that those cases are more prominent. (J.K. Rowling, suffering from the much rarer condition of Fifth Novel Anxiety Syndrome, seems to have got the message, and has applied for planning permission to add a little room to her large house in Edinburgh to help her rediscover the magic.)

LRB 22 August 2002 | PDF Download