Diversity in DC
Next week, as you may know, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs holds its sprawling annual convention.
It’s known as AWP. As every eagle-eyed Unboxed Writer will notice, it should have been AWAWP. I like the sound of that. A-wawp. A wet fish landing on a hot dock. But they didn’t ask me, did they? Well, of course they didn’t.
AWP will be seated this year, 8 through 11 February, in Trumpian Washington. Our nation’s extraordinarily stressed capital. We must not hold this against the AWP organizers, who are based at George Mason in Fairfax: Major conferences are booked years in advance to capture the convention-center and hotel-room space they need. In fact, next year, a happier locale for AWP—Tampa, the Tropic of Porter. Our dolphins are standing by. And better yet, our politicians are not.
The AWP conference is a movable feast of diversity, last May for example rejecting Charlotte and all similarly inclined locations for future consideration because of its anti-LGBTQ “bathroom laws.” Next week, on Thursday the 9th, alone, there are sessions on:
- “Inclusive anthologies”;
- “Revolutionary mothering,” which has to do with a “legacy of radical and queer black feminists of the 1970s”;
- “Girlhood, womanhood, coming of age”; “
- “Apocalypse poetry by women”;
- “Writing in time of terror and environmental collapse”;
- The “politics of queering characters”;
- “Which comes first, activism or artist?”;
- “Community building around art and literature”;
- “The body in words…and the feminist working class”;
- “Global narratives within US literature”; and
- A reading by the Hmong American writers’ circle.
Those are before noon on the 9th. You see, never is heard an exclusionary word at AWP. And this is good.
No, the main qualm that some of us feel here in the competition-soaked commercial world of publishing has to do with that halls of ivy business. While many of us have spent a lot of time in the Academy, of course, we know that students of creative writing on our campuses are rarely fully prepared for the business they expect to storm upon graduation. Many instructors aren’t equipped to teach them, either, finding most of their contracts at their own university presses, where beautiful production and meager sales are the norm, marketing is all but unknown.
Precious few of these students may have been told, even today, how much scarcer traditional publishing contracts have become, let alone that US self-publishers in 2015 produced 625,327 titles with ISBNs. Those indie books without ISBNs take the number of self-published books—before the trade even gets out of bed—well above 1 million titles per year.
There are sessions at AWP, mind you, that get at a bit of this. Our good colleague Paula Munier is on a business-of-publishing panel with some other good folks, also on the 9th. But get this title: “Agents and Editors and Publishers, Oh My! [Are we tired of that Oz formulation yet? Yes, we are.] Demystifying the Business Side of Writing and Publishing.” Now, think about that. Students of writing in college (hotly pursued by MFA programs at AWP) need a 75-minute session on business demystification at a conference?
So what are they teaching the kids back on the collegiate ranch?
Well, I’ll tell you what they’re teaching, and that’s where you come in. My provocation for you today has to do with the very first thing you hear when you click on this year’s AWP conference overview and a video begins playing whether you’d like it to or not. (Remind me to propose the “Writers who’d rather not find auto-running videos on conference sites” session for next year.)
It’s the voice of author Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children. And he is saying to these big children of our campuses: “Writing is so hard.”
Then Go Do Something Else
You may not like me for this today, but I’m very tired of the writing community’s love of the “writing is so hard” trope. Here in our big pink month of romance, I propose that we all get down on one or the other knee (your choice) and vow never again to say “writing is so hard.”
Shall we just look out of our Marriott windows during AWP in the direction of Capitol Hill? There lies hard. Take a peek at the Justice Department. Hard. I’ll even hand it to the Whiter House: Really hard, and whatever you may think about what’s going on in there, the people inside that mansion are aging themselves in dog years. They’re doing it to the rest of us, too.
Writing is not hard. Or go do something else.
Hell, in this AWP video—these are clips of comments made by writing luminaries on AWP stages in the past—Perrotta even goes on to tell us that “ideas are so scarce for me.” Really? It’s so much more useful to hear Amy Tan, moments later, talking of how she was a successful business writer, which took some pressure off her fiction work. She’s putting together strengths, not whining that “writing is so hard.”
I apologize for what I realize is a fairly limp excuse for a valentine here, but every person—student or otherwise—who approaches the writing and publishing market today is facing a glut. That Wall of Content, as I call it. Both the trade and our self-publishing sector have inundated the market without generating new readership for it, new customers. This marketplace is fearsome even for those who find writing to be freakishly easy.
And when authors hunker together to kvetch about “writing is so hard,” they’re romancing the career in a profoundly counter-productive way. They’re sending messages into their own and others’ consciousnesses that help no one. And, they’re probably admitting that they have no business in our show business.
If you’re a genuine writer, it probably should not be that hard. As in most professions, a certain level of aptitude is not too much to expect of those coming in the door.
So here’s where I’d like your input. Do you find that “writing is so hard”? No, I mean really. Where does this poor-us belly-aching come from? Do we need to start an “Alternative Careers!” section of Writer Unboxed?
If you’ll be at AWP, I’ll be on a panel sponsored by CLMP, Current Trends in Literary Publishing, at 1:30 p.m. Thursday 9 February in Room 202A, Level Two, at the Washington Convention Center. And my great colleague Jane Friedman and I will have a booth at the AWP Bookfair for The Hot Sheet, our biweekly industry subscription newsletter for traditional and self-publishing authors. Come by No 868 and tell us h0w hard writing is, won’t you?
Wish you could buy Porter a glass of Campari?
Now, thanks to tinyCoffee and PayPal, you can!
About Porter Anderson
@Porter_Anderson is a recipient of London Book Fair's International Excellence Award for Trade Press Journalist of the Year. He is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, the international news medium of Frankfurt Book Fair New York. He co-founded The Hot Sheet, a newsletter for trade and indie authors, which now is owned and operated by Jane Friedman. Priors: The Bookseller's The FutureBook in London, CNN, CNN.com and CNN International–as well as the Village Voice, Dallas Times Herald, and the United Nations' WFP in Rome. PorterAndersonMedia.com
Porter!
Goodness, it’s great to see you. Missed your face and input at this past UnCon.
Storylines and titles and fears, oh, my! (Yeah, we are pretty tired of the Oz incarnations.) For me, the act of writing isn’t exactly hard in and of itself unless I get snagged on finding the precise word instead of moving forward with the story. No matter how many times I tell myself to keep writing and fix it later, I’ll sit there for days (um…figuratively…let’s just say figuratively) pulling my hair out.
Towards the end, you wrote, “And when authors hunker together to kvetch about ‘writing is so hard,’ they’re romancing the career in a profoundly counter-productive way. They’re sending messages into their own and others’ consciousnesses that help no one.” I believe that to be truth. Just as in the power of positive thinking, there’s power in the negative, as well.
Thanks for another provocative piece, Porter, and have a Campari on me. Good to see you again.
Hey, Mike,
And a big thanks for that Campari, sir — that will give me the strength to look the groundhog in the face!
I have to confess that I, too, can get pretty fixated on a small problem in writing at times, but I still maintain that in the grand scheme of the many things writers might be doing (and many things they ARE doing in life in addition to writing), writing just isn’t that hard, or shouldn’t be.
And I don’t mean to be critical with this as much as worried that we send an unhealthy message when we set it up as being “so hard.” Even beyond positive thinking (you’re right), it’s just not really that accurate. at least for most.
And accuracy’s stock is rising these days, isn’t it? :)
Thanks again!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Ooh, what fun. A nice dose of perspective. I often think about this question. When I’m working on my writing, it’s hard.Because I want to do it well. I have to fulfil my expectations and do justice to the half-understood ideal I’m chasing. But really, it’s not like many of the examples you’ve mentioned, or deciding whether to amputate a leg.
I’m a pretty dedicated writer – as you’ll see from my online presence – you could comfortably describe it as a monomania. This runs deep. My pride in myself is mostly based on how well I write my books. It is my identity; it makes me feel worthwhile. It probably sorts me out so that I am reasonable company in the rest of life. But I also have a freelance ‘day job’, and there I see things that remind me I am lucky. I am not required to make life or death decisions, or deal with real, tears and blood suffering. I make art, which I hope will be powerful and meaningful and relevant and enduring, but I don’t have the capacity to do much harm.
Don’t mean to hijack Roz here, but I couldn’t have said it better myself. So I won’t. LOL. Thanks, Roz!
I might add… If you don’t wake almost every morning loving what you do, do something else. This goes for any career, not just writing. Life is too short to waste, doing something you don’t absolutely love.
Thank you for the awesome post, Porter. A real reminder of ‘why’ we do this crazy thing called writing.
Dee Willson
Author of A Keeper’s Truth and GOT (Gift of Travel)
Hey, thanks, Denise,
I love your note about getting up loving what you do. For a long time, I’ve been trying to gently tell writers that if they need to plow through five motivational blog sites before they can even face the keyboard each day, that they’re looking for inspiration in the wrong place — it should come from the joy of the work, itself, as you say.
“Life is too short.” So true. Well said, and thanks again!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Hi, Roz,
And thanks for the very eloquent statement here. It’s a generous one, too.
I think we all can easily talk ourselves into the idea that our work is both harder and greater than it is — and we can all be forgiven for that, especially when, as you describe, the quality and the intent of excellence is so strong. It’s honorable to take it seriously, not the opposite, and the cultivation of quality is something to be supported.
As you say, any of us in writing is lucky by comparison so so many. (The medical-decisions level you mention is harrowing in the extreme, just as doing surgery is, with lives in your hands.)
I think the kind of kvetching I’m talking about exists on a lower plane, a kind of gossip-exchange place of interaction in which it’s easy to feed each other’s tendencies in a good old gripe session. It gets into us more than we might think, I fear, and can weigh us down without our realizing it.
Identifying (rightly) as closely as you do to the work, I think it can be empowering to realize that while for many writing IS very hard, for most of us who do it professionally, it’s amazingly less onerous than it might be — celebrating your articulate dexterity might boost your energies more than sensing the difficulties, at least on a good day when there’s a little sunshine and some hope of spring.
Thanks again,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Perrotta’s statement, taken out of context, is so vague and open-ended that it’s hard to respond to it.
As a single parent and former welfare recipient, as someone who has worked in a factory and a garage, an 8th grade classroom and a cutthroat business environment, I can affirm that there are many things much harder than writing.
Yet anything we want to do well is hard. I would hate for writing programs to coddle students into thinking that writing is so easy that they don’t have to work at their craft. From what I’ve seen, someone who works hard will always do better than someone coasting on their natural aptitude.
However, you’re talking here about the responsibility of writers themselves, as opposed to instructors. If we are to be honest, then I think we must speak from our own experience, though it doesn’t hurt to balance that with other views.
Good thoughts, indeed, Barbara,
And yes, I look back at some of the jobs I’ve had in the past and am grateful to be beyond them. (They include, amusingly now, a stint as a janitor, a distributor of small bonsai tree plants, of all things, and a painter of patients’ rooms in a nursing home. It’s amazing the things we get up to during our lives, isn’t it?)
You’re right that my main emphasis here is how we hold this question of difficulty and challenge for ourselves as writers — I’m fully with you on not wanting students to be led to think that good writing is easy, anymore than I like to see them unprepared for the marketplace.
So thanks again for your input and for reading me, as always.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Since Perrotta’s Little Children was absolutely brilliant, I figure he should be allowed to have whatever opinion he wants about writing, since he’s obviously doing it right. Suggesting that he has “no business in our show business” is laughable. Maybe writing is hard when you care enough to do work as insightful, moving, and artful as his.
Hi, Linda,
I know you know very well that I didn’t say that Perrotta has no business writing, nor did I say anything negative about his work. Perhaps something else is bothering you and prompting you to respond with such ill-placed negativity.
All the best,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
This attitude can be irritating, esp. if made in a whiny tone, and if it goes on and on. I don’t have patience for it. Thankfully, most of my writing friends have an Onward! attitude. I’ve been known to say, quit. If you really love it, you’ll come back to it. There are seasons to this writing life as well.
Most people who make a habit of whining are not grateful for the many blessings in their lives. They focus on the sprinkles they don’t have instead of the cookie they have. And some people don’t even get a cookie. Once the basic physical needs are met, people turn to creating art. It’s part of our human psyche, to make music or drawings or stories that lift our spirits.
I’ve always thought we need art for our souls. Eileen Spinelli wrote a lovely picture book about this: Three Pebbles and a Song. And Joseph Pieper wrote an eye-opening book about Leisure.
Is writing hard? It can be, when your skills don’t match your vision. But it is a great joy to keep working to close the gap. It is a great gift to have this writing life.
“But it is a great joy to keep working to close the gap.” So beautiful said, Vijaya.
Agree, Susan.
A terrific and thoughtful comment, Vijaya, thank you.
I’m glad that you’ve been able to say to folks at times that they can quit and see if their interest in writing brings them back. Excellent advice, as is your observation that there are seasons to a writing life, indeed.
I’m with Susan, I love “keep working to close the gap,” too.
Thanks much!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Perrotta: “ideas are so scarce for me.” Poor lamb. My biggest writing problem is a surplus of ideas, as it surely is for most of us here. I believe it was J. S. Bach who said his problem was trying to keep from stepping on his ideas when he got out of bed every morning.
LOL Anna. Great quote from Bach.
I’ll admit that I don’t always find writing a joy, but it doesn’t seem to be in [my] human nature to “feel one thing always,” as Mabel Waring laments in Virginia Woolf’s short story “The New Dress.” Good days and bad days type thing… And it IS hard to make the million and one choices required when one is constructing a narrative. The process requires great mental exertion.
But as hard as a class of 8th graders or a day in the White House? Maybe not. Anyway, thanks for a thoughtful post. I will at least think next time before I grumble!
Hi, there,
Love the “feel one thing always” line, so insightful, lol. me, too.
Thanks for reading and commenting!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
There is a time when “writing is hard” is a useful idiom, and that’s when it’s used to splash water on a cash-register-sound-in-the-eyelids Starbucks jockey who has told you he thinks he’ll write a novel and publish it himself, because so many people are making money that way, or that his idea is so good not only a publisher, but a movie studio, will snap it up. Those words are more civil than derisive laughter, or a Danny Thomas spit take.
And for those of us who’ve been in the game awhile, the thought can be shared among us, because (as Roz suggests above) if you do care about your writing, it does get harder. Your standards go up (or should). I believe it was Thomas Mann who said, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
But to the public, no. We’re blessed to be able to do this. No whining allowed.
I used to have a “no whining” button when I taught chemistry. We need another for writers :)
And here I was, thinking that chem people were far better adjusted than us writers. :)
Thanks, Vijaya.
-p.
On Twitter: Porter_Anderson
Hey, Jim,
I’m loving the water-splash in the face of the writerly minded (or demented) barista, lol.
And a Danny Thomas spit take, haven’t thought of that for years, fun to recall that shtick.
I’m right with you and Roz (and Thomas Mann) about the importance of doing it well, thus it gets hard, but yes, no whining.
And thanks to Vijaya’s note, I’m thinking we might manufacture that “No Whining” button for writers — all parts made in the US of A, of course — and we’ll be rich, I tell you, rich. Okay, splash my face now, please.
Thanks, as ever, Jim!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Irrespective of the context of Mr. Perrotta’s remark, of course writing is hard. But if it weren’t, there would be no room to learn and grow. There would be no challenge, no sense of accomplishment, no pride in overcoming resistance – internal as well as external.
Whining, on the other hand, is easy. It nicely shifts responsibility away from yourself and lets you off the hook. If the locus of control is outside yourself, you don’t even have to try very hard because the decks are stacked against you anyway.
Somehow, hard sounds a lot more rewarding to me. Thank you, Porter, for your gutsy post.
LK,
Thank YOU for such a thoughtful response, let alone for reading the piece.
You’re putting your finger on the shift of responsibility that occurs as soon as we allow ourselves to place the onus on something or someone outside ourselves—something, in fact, that we see happening right now in a great deal of the rationale being deployed in certain parts of our governance.
I’m with you, hard sounds good to me, and well worth its challenge.
Thanks again!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Thanks for this perspective. In the 1980s, I taught “how to get a book published” workshops as part of my editing/ghosting business. The biggest surprise was having writing program grads tell me they hadn’t learned any of the nuts and bolts of the business itself. They knew next to nothing about book proposals and query letters and even back then, indie choices, which professional speakers and consultants often preferred. It struck me as odd then, but eventually I realized these students represented the rule, not the exception.
Writing may be hard at times, but especially today, putting together a career/business combining nonfiction in all its forms and/or fiction involves work and a lot of luck. Really, how lucky are we that we can make a living or part of a living doing this hard thing we love so much? I’ve been at this on the nonfiction side for a few decades, and more recently turned to fiction, and even with the insecurity, business dips, market shifts, the endless quest for health insurance, and other realities of self-employment, I still can’t believe I got this lucky life. I hope someone is talking about that side of the creative life at these kinds of conferences.
Thanks for the reminders in this piece.
Such a gracious response, Virginia.
You’re quite right that the lack of business training in the academic writerly setting has been a shortfall for decades.
Probably, in fact, one of the most interesting sub-stories of this whole situation is that trade publishing has made such a profound shift to understanding the centricity of business matters in most successful authors’ careers — while the Academy continues to skirt this, duck it, or (probably most concerning) simply remain unaware of this sea change in what and how we teach authors.
Case in point: When I and my colleague Jane Friedman programmed the DBW Indie Author conference last month in New York, one of the most satisfying comments we got was from attendees who felt they’d been spoken to AS businesspeople BY businesspeople. (We had Atria Books publisher Judith Curr, for example, Authors Guild executive director Mary Rasenberger, consultants Jon Fine and Peter McCarthy, Ingram’s Margaret Harrison, and many more — high-profile professionals whose presence meant to our audience that its own professionalism was valued and critical.)
And this is not what we’ll see at AWP. Hundreds of sessions will go by in that kind of aesthetic reverie that too many campus folks, even the best, get lost in. I confess I usually leave AWP frustrated and concerned about this, but the network of creative writing programs in this country has yet to be able to really focus its interests on this deficit. They could easily create a daylong conference-within-AWP to outline the basics these good students need to know, for example, and would have the support of many of us in the business. But we’re just not there yet.
And I love your calling it a side of the creative life. Yes, this ability to ply a career (as you say, full or part time) is actually part of the experience and part of the creativity of it.
Good thoughts, and thanks again,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Nope, it’s not hard for me. And I have too many ideas. Yes, I’ve had to practice, practice, practice and learn craft. But it’s my natural ability. And I’m finally making money writing fiction. Like Amy Tan, for years I was (and still am) a business writer.
Great to hear, Liz.
I like hearing of your experience of it as “practice, practice, practice,” but not hard. And business writing is a super basis for good fiction.
Congrats,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Porter–
A propos your as-usual fine post, I find myself occasionally moved to use a certain response on Facebook to posts from friends. Not often, just when someone feels the need to post about how he had to spend two whole hours sitting in the customer service lounge at an auto dealership, or she needed cod loins for tonight’s recipe, but got to the counter just as someone bought the last order, or lost cable service RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of “Sleepless in Seattle.”
My all-purpose comment is: “Another one of those knotty First-world problems.” I am risking my friends’ ire in an effort to draw attention to how undeserving such concerns can sound–especially these days.
I have the same attitude to those who fill column inches (or workshop sessions) dwelling on the anguishing emotional complexities of writing. To such people I want to apply the treatment used in a cartoon captioned “single-session psychotherapy.” The drawing shows a bearded shrink in the open doorway of his office. His patient has his back to us, and the shrink is in the act of slapping him. “Snap out of it!” he shouts.
Enough already with gnashing teeth and wringing hands. Just get on with it, or don’t.
Thanks again. I doubt you ever waste anyone’s time.
“…aging themselves in dog years.” That made me plotz, Porter. I think anything one loves to do can be hard at times, but I’m with Vijaya about the whining. Is it cultural? Generational? I don’t know, but my feeling is yeah, so what if it is hard? Is hard such a bad thing? Especially if it makes you stronger, smarter, faster, better? We even have a Whiner-in-Chief now. Oi. Anyway, I’m grateful for the tough writing days because then I can really savor the moments when I hit the groove and the story starts to glow and I feel the rush in my blood. You don’t get the light without the dark. Thanks for a splendid provocation and a wonderful Valentine to us all!
A bold, brash and contentious piece, Porter.
You I like.
I used to align with the “If writing is easy, you’re doing it wrong” camp. Then I stopped camping and found my own voice. Once one does that, writing is practically hedonism.
Making a LIVING writing? Now THAT’s hard. But if you’re writing only to make money, you don’t love it enough, so go do something else.
This is not to say I never have a bad day while working on a manuscript. But whenever I do, I think about those who have it so much worse than I. My protagonist, for instance.
Thanks for this post, Porter. Hopefully for many it will serve as a kick in the pants.
Best,
GL
Writing is many things. Yes, there are problems to work out as your novel grows. Does that make writing hard? More a challenge. If someone asked me why I write, I would never say, “Oh, I write because writing is hard.” Is Perrotta looking for a slap on the back? And as many of you have said, there are a lot harder occupations in this world and I’ve done two of them: teacher of high school English and OB nurse. I love writing. Whether I’m successful or not–no one can label it for me. It’s MY THING.
Thank you so much for your post. As Mike said, we missed you at UNCON2016. Hopefully, we will run into each other at AWP.
Cheers!
Writing is easy. Writing well takes work. Writing for publication takes persistence. Publication itself and promotion require altogether different skills.
So, no, I don’t see hard anywhere in there.
The only moderately difficult part is facing writing leaps you don’t yet know how to make, and finding there is hardly anyone to show you how. There comes a point when you are on your own, trying to invent your unique wheel. For that the only remedy is guts, confidence and the willingness to try a hundred different filament materials before your lightbulb finally blazes and lights the world.
But heck, what would you rather do? I find that as long as writing is fun, then there is no part too hard to do. My motivation is nothing more than that: have a blast.
Porter, I always welcome your breath of brisk reality in my inbox.
Am I wrong to sense your post has two threads? First you hit the commercial difficulty–the math of more authors and no new readers. (And universities not teaching about this reality or how to handle it.)
Perrotta introduces another thread; the challenge of craft–words/language on sequential pages for affect and meaning.
You end with clusters of writers kvetching, presumably about both threads. For me it helps to separate them. 1) Marketing? Steep climb. It is what is it. It evolves, but every business is under stress these days. We’re in a rape and pillage mode.
2) Craft? Creating anything is akin to milking the sky, but we who write (dance, sing, paint) are blessed to know this magic portal. Some have affinity for finding teats up there, but still it takes work. Others poke around overhead and in time find a source. On this score, if we absorb that writing is SO hard, by God, it will be, because whatever thoughts we carry are the same medium we tap for creativity. Why shoot our minds in the feet?
Comparing writing pages to white water canoeing (whoda thunk), sometimes rivers run full, sometimes there are rocky stretches, sometimes you have to portage around. My inner guide tells me try not to judge the river for the season it’s in.
The two threads come together when we avoid inhibiting our creativity, our work will be at its best, which helps its journey to find publishers and readers.
Great to see you here. Thanks for the slaps upside the head.
Writing is not hard. A month with 5 pins holding together 4 broken bones in my (writing) hand, followed by 11 months of physical therapy – that’s hard. But the challenge in writing – at least for me – is getting it to the point where I’m not afraid to share it.
I just sent out the opening chapter of my next book to a few beta readers (the only missing part of my book proposal). It’s the fourth, maybe fifth draft (yes, I’m obsessing just a bit). One person asked to read it, but I’m scared to send it to her. She’s in it, and her part of the chapter is not there yet. It’s close, but not close enough.
To be honest, I was in despair about this book for weeks. Yes, the market glut was part of it. My broken hand was part of it (I’m able to drive again as of today, so fair warning if you’re in Chicago). And then I got inspiration from an unexpected place, reminding me why the book was worth writing.
I have no illusions about the marketplace. The book will be finished and published, though a lot of the specifics are still unknown. I’ll do what I can and accept that so much of this is beyond my control. I’m okay with that. I think.
At any rate, Porter, I’m back. Consider yourself warned. ;)
Viki
PS – If you’re in DC for AWP, have a hurricane for me at Acadiana.
Writing isn’t hard. But rewriting? Now that’s hard.
Okay, before someone scolds me for saying that, let me add: it’s hard, but it’s a struggle I choose to engage in because by golly, I want to “get” it. I just want to figure out how to rewrite my novel, and do it well.
That said, when we agonize over our characters and plot and word choice and whatever else seems difficult in writing, it’s helpful to remember: we’re the ones making it all up! Just go with a choice and see how it pans out.
Porter –
When exposed to the earnest “woe is me” or “nothing is harder than facing a blank page” wailing from some whose life affords them the opportunity to write, I’ve had to supress the urge to laugh.
Seriously? I’m not insensitive and the challenge of writing is great, but look at the world and the lives many/most on the planet face.
We are among the lucky/blessed who should revel in our incredible good fortune. I recently read an article identifying that the foundation of a positive attitude is gratitude. Much truth there imo and your thoughts echo that theme for me.
A most refreshing post and wonderful comments. Thank you!
Hey Porter,
Good to see your face again.
Of course writing is hard, but to that comment I would say, “What’s your point?”
Anything you decide to do and do well will be hard, there are learning curves, raising the bar, challenging yourself to be better, etc. Why would anyone expect that to be easy? And are we ever happy with those accomplishments we’ve attained by phoning it in? I think not.
The cynic in me wonders if this ‘writing is hard’ trope is more about people trying to thin the herd or conversely justifying their own failures at the craft. Could be. But again, that is my inner cynic speaking.
As others have said, there are far more things in the world that are harder than writing – much harder. Life and death decision type stuff. Thanks, but I’ll navigate the ‘hard’ field of writing instead. And thank God every day that I live in a world where I can pursue my passion and purpose. And living in a time when being a writer is so much easier than it was even 10 years ago.
As writers we are blessed to have the skills and talent to put words to paper and create something amazing. It is a joy to be able to create and to share that creation.
In my opinion, no good can come of forwarding the whine of writing is hard because it, as you so eloquently point out, is counter productive.
Perhaps what should be said instead is that writing requires dedication, hard work, constant learning and growth. That if one is not willing or able to do that then perhaps writing is not something they should contemplate. But also that if one is willing to put in the work (hard or otherwise) they stand to reap immeasurable benefits they wouldn’t know otherwise.
Great post, I think perhaps you are poking the bear of the politically correct crowd, and I congratulate you for doing so.
Cheers,
Annie
I agree. Maybe because I’m a social worker and have gotten to see some truly awful things go down in people’s lives, I’m not terribly tolerant of the “writing is so hard” complaint. And while it’s not easy to have your personal dreams and wishes not come to fruition, there’s a lot worse things going on in the world than having personal dreams foiled. Just the other day I was wondering if people still thought in terms of “first world problems.” I think “writing is so hard” is one of those. Unless, of course, you are in a place where you get your hand cut off because someone doesn’t like your work or finds it anti-government. Then writing is hard. But just not getting an agent or not selling mounds of books, when you have adequate income otherwise, is kind of a first world problem.