It’s not a shark but the blank page that can induce a sense of failure in a writer, observed US singer-songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman today on BBC Radio 2 (about 75 minutes in). She said the hardest work you may do as a writer is staring at that blank space for two hours when nothing is coming through.

But achieving nothing concrete in that time is not failure. “You just lifted 2,000 pounds in the gym of creativity,” she said. She also used a marathon metaphor: “People don’t run out the door and run 26 miles. They create the muscles first.” You do that by making sure you turn up and try, even if you don’t write something.

Nielsen Chapman teaches creativity and songwriting and believes creativity exists within everyone, but in many of us this is blocked. It’s like a fine white linen towel on a high shelf waiting to be reached and pulled down, she said.

Perhaps, as well as latent talent, it is knowledge of how to persist that separates the elite athlete or the Nielsen Chapman from the rest of us. They persist until they can reach.

Reading Football Club manager Steve Coppell was being criticised for fielding a weakened team against Manchester United in the Fifth Round FA Cup replay Tuesday, devaluing the competition in pursuit of League ambitions and a place in European competition (a good source of extra cash).

It would seem to be symptomatic of the British disease of short-termism that he should face these brickbats. Anyone watching the first 20 minutes of the game would have agreed the team was below par, as Reading quickly conceded three goals. In the end, the result was 3-2 to the League leader, which also was not at full strength. But the quality of the home team was certainly vindicated, even if its early match strategy was not.

But competition is not just about one game. Confidence and success are threaded together. Overburden too few players with responsibility for carrying all the hopes of fans, particularly as a team becomes more successful, and that success may be short-lived. Rest and recovery are central to sustained success.

The low point-scoring value of a single goal makes football a particularly chancey game. So it may well pay to take a risk with a weaker team sometimes anyway. This is why football is more exciting according to statisticians. It produces more reversals of fortune.

But fans are a bit like investors. And club chairmen very definitely are. Losing is painful. This works against the hapless manager who needs time to build a long-term strategy, and may explain why key players are fielded too often, only to compound team weakness when they become re-injured.

Coppell seems to be a very tactical manager in any event. The Reading team compensates for its relative weakness against “super clubs” by aggressive practising of set-piece plays. In that respect, he creates a lot of his own luck. Hats off to him. He also has a degree in economics . As comedian Harry Hill would say: “what are the chances of that happenin’?”