A Hard Job

 

Good writing is like climbing a mountain. It takes time and hard work as well as skill.

As I’ve mentioned before, my current novel is written in the form of weekly newspaper columns. At one point I have my protagonist tell her readers, “I can imagine what you are thinking. How can it take two days to write a 1,000-word column?” My online critique partner’s response was, “I never thought that.”

Of course she hadn’t, because she’s a writer, too, but many people do. And I’m not the only writer who feels that way.

Here are a few quotes about how writers are treated by the uninitiated.

It has always seemed to me that if you have a hope of making a living as an artist – writer, musician, whatever – you absolutely must learn to tell people to leave you alone, and to mean it, and to eject them from your life if they don’t respect that. This is necessary not because your job is more important than anyone else’s – it isn’t – but because a great many people will think of you as not having a job. [Poppy Z. Brite]

 

A successful businesswoman had the temerity to ask me about my royalties, just at the time when my books were at last making reasonable earnings. When told, she was duly impressed, and remarked, “And to think that most people would have had to work so hard for that.” [Madeline L’Engle, Walking on Water (1980), ch. 7]

 

A young friend of mine was asked what she did, and when she replied she was a poet, the inquirer responded, amused, “Oh, I didn’t mean your hobby.” [Madeline L’Engle, Walking on Water (1980), ch. 7]

And here is how writers respond:

Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. [George Orwell, Why I Write, 1947]

 

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven’t been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching. [Harlan Ellison]

 

I would never encourage anyone to be a writer. It’s too hard. [Eudora Welty]

 

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. [Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades, 1947]

 

Sure, it’s simple writing for kids . . . Just as simple as bringing them up. [Ursula K. LeGuin]

 I’ll end there because I need to return to my mountain climbing.