Writers’ Angst

Posted 7 June, 2007 in Writing Life |

From Marcel Proust sealing himself inside his cork-lined room while writing À la recherche du temps perdu, to Gustave Flaubert rolling around on the floor in agony trying to discover “le mot juste,” to James Joyce complaining that he managed to write seven words in a day, but didn’t know what order to arrange them in, writers’ lives have always been filled with a certain amount of existential angst. But it’s hard to imagine Proust or Flaubert or Joyce having much sympathy for Anna Holmes, the thirty-three-year-old editor of Hell Hath No Fury: Women’s Letters from the End of the Affair:

“If you have an office job, at least it’s walking to and from the subway every day. When you sit in your house, you seriously gain weight,” Ms. Holmes said in a phone interview from her Long Island City apartment. “I’m eating my Greek yogurt and steamed vegetables—I’m trying to be good about what I’m eating. But I’m still like, ‘I’m getting really soft.’ My idea before the book came out was that I was going to diet, because I had gotten flabby, so that I’d look better to promote it. But that didn’t happen. I was quote unquote dieting for I think two weeks, but I just couldn’t do it.”

Poor thing. This comment is one of a series of increasingly whiny, petulant, and obnoxious remarks from a number of writers (including Canada’s own Leah McLaren) contained in a New York Observer article about how bad they have it and what a tough slog this whole writing business is.

Don’t get me wrong: writing is not easy. It takes patience and dedication and a certain obsessiveness, and writing a book-length piece can take years. Having said that, I get fairly agitated when I hear writers like twenty-five-year-old Brendan Sullivan say things like this:

“Writing has ruined my life and cost me many, many girlfriends […] I have thrown away several careers and one college degree to spend my time working in bars, D.J.’ing in bars and drinking my rejection letters away. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, and I’ve made many of them since I started …. I also abandoned my agent with words harsher than those I’ve saved for lost loves.”

The words “get over yourself” come to mind. The decision to write — to be a writer — is a conscious one and should not be the occasion for a maudlin retreat into self-pity about the horrible state of one’s life as a result.

Let’s face it: however difficult writing can be — and it can be extremely difficult — it’s not really a hardscrabble life. Writers are people who have chosen to sit at a table with a pen and paper, a laptop computer, or some other writing implement, and create things for the edification and enjoyment of others. Noble? Sure. Necessary, even. But not quite the equivalent of working the mines in 1860s France.

Colleen Mondor has it about right, it seems to me:

Okay, you already know what I think about all this (I can’t keep the sarcasm to myself, even when quoting), but let me explain why I have no pity for writers who support themselves through writing. My father was a wastewater treatment plant supervisor. He worked in sewage almost his entire adult life (more than 30 years). He had acidic chemicals splashed on his face once, he wore steel toe boots because of dropping manhole covers and he died at the age of 60, after a diagnosis similar to several co-workers, from a cancer that no one could explain - except that maybe some of the chemicals he worked with over his career had killed him.

That is hard work.

My pepere drove an oil delivery truck for FIFTY years in Rhode Island. He showed up and drove no matter the weather - no matter the blizzard - because people depended on him; his family depended on him.

That is hard work.

My great grandfather, who I never met, left Canada for the US to give his children a better way of life. He was a farmer who moved to town and a carpenter who could not support his family through his craft. So he worked the textile mills in Rhode Island in the 1920s and 30s. Have you read stories about those mills? People died in those places.

That is hard work.

I agree that writing is not easy - and I know from first hand experience that it is hard. But there is a whale of difference between something being hard and it being hard work. Sitting in a clean house, with heat and food and running water while you create something of your own making - while you let your imagination run loose and take you places you never thought possible - that is pleasure; that is beauty.

In the grand scheme of things, that is damn easy.

[UPDATE: Callie Miller says what I wanted to say: “I’ve met many well-adjusted writers who work alone all day but then go back out into the world. Many who see their job as any other job - work. Damn hard work. Some days it is exhilarating, some days it is downright awful. I don’t know any writers who think it will be a walk in the park. But you do the work. Period.”]

2 comments to “Writers’ Angst”

patricia, June 8th, 2007 at 2:53 pm:

• Love this post. “Get over yourself” barely begins to describe how I feel about these twats. And of course Leah would be in this group. She’s all pissy ‘cuz Eckler’s stealing some of her vaccuous thunder these days.

  Yes, writing is hard. If it was always easy, what the hell would be the point? I can remember many nights when I was a teenager, staying up late in my bedroom, struggling to write something clever, brilliant, profound. Most of the time I failed miserably, but the indescribable joy when one succeeded, never mind the joy in just being alone with one’s thoughts, creating something out of nothing, even if the end result is shite – how the hell can that ever compare to soul-destroying physical labour? Try farming in Saskatchewan during the depression, living in a hole in the ground for a year before finally having a real house like my grandparents did. Like Colleen Mondor said, that is hard work.

  And ditto what Callie said, too.

Steven W. Beattie, June 8th, 2007 at 10:37 pm:

• I remember Geena Davis complaining to Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own that she can’t keep playing for the baseball team because it’s too hard. Hanks’s reply: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it weren’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.” That seems about right to me.

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