Second Novel Syndrome

Today's Writers' Guild blog has an interesting piece about writing your second novel. It quotes Luke Leitch, writing in The Times:

First novels, goes the orthodoxy, are the fruits of years of thought shaped into words at the writer's leisure.

Stephen Fry explained this when presenting the Encore Award - a £10,000 biannual literary prize for second novels.

He said: "The problem with a second novel is that it takes almost no time to write compared with a first novel. If I write my first novel in a month at the age of 23, and my second novel takes me two years, which have I written more quickly? The second of course. The first took 23 years, and contains all the experience, pain, stored-up artistry, anger, love, hope, comic invention and despair of that lifetime. The second is an act of professional writing. That is why it is so much more difficult."

Tell me about it. :-\