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by Benjamin Cavell, author of Rumble, Young Man, Rumble
I have always been afraid that if anyone knew how difficult writing was for me, they would never read my work. Everyone loves stories of mythic discipline--Hemingway wrote standing up for twenty-three hours every day; Kipling would hire local gangs to beat him with lead pipes at the end of any afternoon during which he did not write at least a thousand words--but when it comes time to actually sit and enjoy the work, no reader wants to be confronted by the drudgery of an author's days. Part of the fiction of fiction is that its creation is effortless. |
Every writing-advice book admonishes its readers to write every day. I read one once that, in giving its reasoning for this advice, asked, "What if the angel came and I wasn't there?" My objection to that--beyond my aversion to its facile, sentimental treatment of writing as magic (writing may in fact be magic but anyone who would say that thing about the angel wouldn't be able to tell you why)--is that on days the "angel" comes, it takes no discipline to write. That is, the really inspired days are the ones on which you don't have to force yourself to write. Of course writing, when it's going, is an ecstasy. The drudgery of being a professional writer comes in trying to make good days out of bad days and in squeezing out the words when they won't just flow. Writing every day is vital to the life of a writer in part because, before one is published, there are very few concrete indications that one is in fact a writer. You are a writer because you say you are and maybe because other people say you are, but mostly you are a writer because you write. On days when you don't write, it's not as clear what you are. But, again, these are things that the reader doesn't want to know. These are things that one maybe wants to read in a literary biography when the subject's work is only rarely read for pleasure anymore. "There appears," says Dr. Johnson, "to be a strange affectation in authors of appearing to have done everything by chance." I don't think it's so strange. | ||
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