On the Disposition of Writers

Posted 14 April, 2008 in Writing Life | 3 comments

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, about Mordecai Richler during one of his very infrequent teaching gigs. Richler was somehow finagled into teaching a summer course at the Humber School for Writers, and on the first day (so the story goes) Joe Kertes, who administered the program, walked past Richler’s classroom and observed the professor sitting on a window sill gazing out at the sky while his students sat in uncomfortable silence. Poking his head in the room, Kertes is said to have uttered cheerfully, “Well, shall we get started?” At which point Richler turned his head and said, “What would be the point?”

Whether this story is true or not is immaterial: it might as well be. Richler was, by all accounts, a fairly prickly sort who didn’t suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. He had a pronounced cruel streak, and wasn’t afraid to cut someone off at the knees if he felt they deserved it.

The question is: does this make a reader less inclined to like his writing? According to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, it should. Writing in the Evening Standard, Alibhai-Brown explains why she will never again buy a book by acclaimed novelist V.S. Naipaul:

Patrick French has just published an unflinchingly honest biography of Nobel prize-winning writer VS Naipaul, who comes across as unpleasant and stuffed with conceit. That, I guess, is true of many other authors, too. But Naipaul is exceptionally malevolent, a man without grace or humanity, sadistic to those who have dared to love him. So why do we tolerate such behaviour in writers?

This is a peculiar, and all too prevalent, brand of literary dilettantism that makes my blood boil. By all accounts (not just French’s), Naipaul is not a very nice man. But what does the fact that he is “unpleasant and stuffed with conceit” have to do with his artistic output? The obvious answer to this rhetorical question is: precisely nothing.

It has always astounded me that certain people think that those who create art must of necessity be paragons of virtue and decency. No doubt some of them are. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, was an inveterate gambler. Philip Van Doren Stern refers to Edgar Allen Poe as a “charlatan, plagiarist, pathological liar, whimpering child, egomaniac, braggart, and irresponsible drunkard.” Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite. Kingsley Amis was a serial adulterer.

So freaking what?

The truth is that many great artists were — and are — reprehensible human beings. The two are not incompatible. It is perfectly possible to feel “contempt” for a writer and still admire that person’s writing. The art and the artist are discrete entities, and each should be judged on its own merits.

Hav U Red My Novl?

Posted 24 January, 2008 in Literary Criticism, Writing Life, Technology | 2 comments

Genji had only grown more thoughtful as he rose to new heights of glory, and he ordered things so well that he wrought a wondrous change, for her residence was soon amply populated. Where once rank foliage had cast a dismal and pervasive pall there now ran a newly diverted stream, while shrubbery near the house yielded cooling shade, and junior household staff, barely noticed so far but zealous to serve him, so clearly discerned his deep interest that they danced most assiduous attendance upon her.

Those words were taken from The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu (trans. by Royall Tyler), an 11th-century Japanese epic that is widely considered to be the world’s first novel. What is most apparent about the lines above is their sensuous detail, the specificity of the “dismal and pervasive pall” cast by the “once rank foliage,” and the subtle eroticism of the junior household staff who “danced most assiduous attendance upon” their mistress.

Now imagine that those lines had been composed on a cellphone.

You can’t, because there’s no way that those lines ever would be composed on a cellphone. They are too long, for one thing, too full of description and elevated vocabulary. The Tale of Genji, which in its unabridged English translation runs to 1,120 pages, is replete with passages such as this, and remains in print to this day.

One wonders if the same fate will befall If You, the 142-page novel by twenty-one-year-old Japanese author Rin, which was composed entirely on a cellphone. Certainly, If You and its literary compeers are enjoying popularity in the short term in their native Japan. According to a recent article in the New York Times, five out of the ten bestselling novels in Japan last year were cellphone novels, “mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels.”

These novels appeal largely to a younger cohort, who grew up with text messages and emoticons and who are not even terribly used to typing long-form sentences on a computer. But, if these ad hoc novels — which devoid of incidentals such as “plotting or character development” may in fact stretch the definition of the word “novel” — are getting young people to read, then everything’s fine, right?

Not necessarily.

The most aggravating part of the Times article for me is Rin’s own assessment of cellphone novels’ place in the literary pantheon, as against more traditional novels:

Rin said ordinary novels left members of her generation cold.

“They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them,” she said. “On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don’t want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I’d like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre.”

So traditional Japanese novels by writers of repute — Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, say, or even genre fiction like Natsuo Kirino’s Out — are not read by younger readers because of the difficulty of their sentences, as opposed to novels tapped out on the miniature cellphone keypad, which, by necessity to avoid early onset carpal-tunnel syndrome or arthritis, are composed of short, choppy, fragmented sentences and paragraphs more closely resembling the dialogue bubbles in a manga comic book.

I am reminded of a story Sven Birkerts related in his volume The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (which, notwithstanding the fact that it was published fourteen years ago, seems more relevant today than it ever did). Birkerts is discussing the frustration that a group of college students experienced with a short story by Henry James:

These students were entirely defeated by James’s prose — the medium of it — as well as by the assumptions that underlie it. It was not the vocabulary, for they could make out most of the words; and not altogether the syntax, although here they admitted to discomfort, occasional abandoned sentences. What they really could not abide was what the vocabulary, the syntax, the ironic indirection, and so forth, were communicating. They didn’t get it, and their not getting it angered them, and they expressed their anger by drawing around themselves a cowl of ill-tempered apathy.

Or by reading readily accessible adolescent love stories written on someone’s cellphone. Birkerts’ students’ complaints about Henry James are exactly analogous to Rin’s comment that readers of her generation don’t read professional novelists because “their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them.”

So what is the problem, you ask? Why should college students and Japanese youth read traditional novels as opposed to novels composed on technology that they are more familiar with, that speaks to them in a way that traditional novels don’t? Birkerts supplies the answer by characterizing what James does that his students weren’t getting:

He is inward and subtle, a master of ironies and indirections; his work manifests a care for the range of moral distinctions. And one cannot “get” him without paying heed to the least twist and turn of the language.

It should not be necessary to point out that James’s inwardness and subtlety, his “ironies and indirections,” and his “care for the range of moral distinctions” cannot — simply cannot – be replicated using the denuded language available to a cellphone texter. Moreover, the fact that James’s implications are impossible to grasp “without paying heed to the least twist and turn of the language” presupposes a level of concentration and deep engagement with the text that would be anathema to most of today’s distracted, media-addled youth.

It’s not difficult to see that we risk losing something in the translation from page to cellphone screen (or computer screen, for that matter). We risk losing an appreciation of subtlety and irony, we risk losing an ability to recognize indirection or to delineate between fine moral distinctions. In short, we risk losing some of what makes us essentially human. I don’t think that’s too grand a statement to make, nor do I think it’s a risk we should be willing to take.

And in the Other Corner …

Posted 20 November, 2007 in Writing Life | No comments

… with a contrarian take on yesterday’s advocacy of the mastery writers develop late in their careers, Melissa Katsoulis argues that the fires of youth are what really inspire great literature:

Not that ageing can’t be a wonderful subject. But it is not what literature is about. Literature is about change. Revolution, revelation, challenge and unrest. It is about forcing us to do things differently. About making things new and seeing them for the first time. This is what every generation must do, in every walk of life, but writing is (and always has been, since Chaucer, since Sophocles) the crucible in which our future selves are formed.

Now, it may be a function of my demographic (I’m no longer in that coveted eighteen-to-thirty-four age bracket), but it seems to me Katsoulis is confusing literature with rock ‘n’ roll. But even taken at face value, her argument doesn’t hold up: if literature is all about “[r]evolution, revelation, challenge and unrest,” and these things are only available to the young, how would she explain Zola, who was forty-five when he published Germinal?* And although she lionizes the youthful excesses of the Romantics (the poets, not the rock band), she elides the fact that John Milton was fifty-nine when he published Paradise Lost.**

As though to preempt her critics, Katsoulis points out that “[i]t’s not that old people write only about pipes and slippers — all too often they write about sex, death and all the extreme situations between. But there’s no getting away from it — it’s so far from being fresh as to be yukky.” I don’t know how old Katsoulis is, but I’d venture to guess that she might revise this opinion if questioned about it twenty-five years hence.

*Not that forty-five qualifies as “old age,” but Katsoulis is talking about writers in their early- to mid-twenties, and she appears to adhere to the old sixties’ radical warning not to trust anyone over thirty.

**And before anyone jumps down my throat about this (possibly awkward) wording: yes, I am fully aware that Milton was not one of the Romantics (either the poets or the rock band). I was trying to make a point.

On Late Mastery

Posted 19 November, 2007 in Writing Life | No comments

Derwent May, writing in the Telegraph, argues that despite our culture’s fetishistic focus on youth, many great writers do their best work in their later years:

Youthful excitement may produce remarkable books. But in many writers, the slow, steady practice of their art, combining with a great burst of vitality towards the end of their life, can lead to extraordinary achievements.

May points to Philip Roth, whom he suggests (correctly, in my opinion) is the greatest living novelist. The young Roth produced the masturbatory fantasia Portnoy’s Complaint (still one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read*), but it was not until he was in his sixties that he produced his masterpiece, American Pastoral.

Similarly, Henry James came to mastery late in life, surpassing his earlier achievements with the sublime late-style novels The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl.

While there are certain authors who achieve great success right out of the gate — Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Safran Foer, Vincent Lam — the tendency for writers is to work towards mastery of their craft. (Ellis has matured with each successive book; Foer seems stuck in a rut; it’s too early to tell with Lam.) Youthful exuberance can be useful for an author, but exuberance alone will not produce enduring literature. Not for nothing did the poet refer to “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”**

*And not, as one friend used to think, about a rock band called “Port Noise Complaint.”

**Postgrad, my ass!

The Impecunious Life of the Literary Novelist

Posted 19 October, 2007 in Writing Life | 6 comments

Blake Morrison, writing in the Guardian, wonders how literary novelists can possibly make a go of it:

Let’s suppose that a realistic sale for a literary novel these days is 2,000 copies in hardback and 8,000 in paperback. At current cover prices, that will generate royalties of around £9,000. Serialisations, film or television options and sales of foreign rights might push earnings up to £12,000. But this isn’t annual income, it’s the proceeds from the three or four years spent writing the novel. Two recent surveys have found that 60% of British authors earn less than £10,000 a year - and that median earnings are less than a quarter of the national wage. You wonder how they, and publishers and agents, keep going.

The short answer is: marry rich, or arrange to inherit a whack of money.

The more nuanced answer, of course, is that they don’t, at least not exclusively on the income earned from their writing. Most literary writers in Canada — even established and relatively well-known ones — supplement their income with other jobs. Many teach. A couple are doctors. Others work variously as train conductors, editors, civil servants, bookstore clerks, and librarians. For these people, writing is a vocation, something they are compelled to do, but not something that provides anything close to a living wage.

Mordecai Richler used to talk ruefully about being asked as a young man what he wanted to do with his life. He’d always answer that he wanted to be a writer. To which the follow-up question was always, “Yes, but how are you going to earn a living?” Stopping off at a local bar for an after-work beer last night, the bartender mentioned that her son was receiving an academic award today and that he is in line for a scholarship. She wants him to be a doctor. Her son wants to be a writer. “Great,” she said, “he’ll spend the rest of his life starving.”

It’s an unfortunate reality that our pseudo-sophisticated society loves the products of artists — the paintings and sculptures, the works of literature and film that people consume to feel like cultured aesthetes — but is not terribly enamoured with artists themselves. Sure, Scotiabank will sponsor the Giller Prize and the Bank of Montreal will sponsor the GG’s, but these awards do little on a day-to-day basis to put food on writers’ tables. There is a granting system in Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, among others, but the system for awarding grants is not without its flaws and the money earmarked for literary work is not sufficient to support too many full-time writers.

Even if a writer is able to scrape by an existence on his or her writing, other things that salaried workers take for granted — such as medical benefits, paid maternity leave, and a pension — aren’t available to them. The Writers’ Union of Canada offers a benefits package, but if you’re not a member, you’re on your own. Russell Smith often talks about his mother’s response to the question of what she thinks of her son being a writer: she wishes he had a job with dental benefits.

And yet writers continue writing, doing whatever they can to supplement their income while still allowing themselves time to create. It should of course be pointed out that the writing life is a choice: no one forces it on anyone, and if material riches are the uppermost desire in a person’s mind, that person would be well advised to look elsewhere when selecting a career.

Personally, I do feel that it wouldn’t hurt if artists were valued more in our society — true, they don’t save lives on a daily basis (okay, Vincent Lam does), but the function of artists is essential to a vibrant society, since, if they’re doing their jobs properly, they act as the conscience and weathervane of that society. However, nowhere is it written that they are entitled to untold adulation and riches.

I, for one, feel privileged to spend my time in literary pursuits; the relatively meagre income I reap from this lifestyle is the tradeoff that I have made in order to keep doing what I’m doing. But don’t think for a moment that this isn’t a conscious choice on my part. And that’s really the bottom line, isn’t it? A writer writes. It’s what he or she is compelled to do. And, like any compulsion, ultimately profit will never be the motivating factor behind it.

Life on the Bottom Shelf

Posted 1 October, 2007 in Writing Life | No comments

Stephen King’s experience editing the 2007 edition of Best American Short Stories leads him to write a thoughtful New York Times Book Review essay about the current state of the American short story. In taking the pulse of the short story today, King finds that there are still stories being written, but the audience for them is dwindling.

This is not news (although it does frequently surprise me that in our current attention-deficit culture the shorter form is not embraced more wholeheartedly). Nor is King’s assessment of one key reason for this state of affairs, notwithstanding the fact that very few commentators are courageous enough to point it out publicly.

The largest market for new short stories is literary journals, which are confined to the bottom shelf of the magazine rack at big box stores such as Barnes & Noble, or Indigo here in Canada. This in itself is a problem, since browsers are not likely to scour the bottom shelf of the magazine rack for the new issue of Grain or Fiddlehead, preferring, as King points out, the more accessible mainstream publications at eye level. (Of these, the titles not devoted to cover profiles of Britney Spears’s latest travails or the speculations about J-Lo’s tummy bump largely don’t feature fiction; Harper’s and The New Yorker are exceptions, and the Atlantic now publishes short fiction only once a year, in its summer issue.)

But that’s not the whole problem; what’s significant is what King sees as the net result of consignment to the bottom shelf. King goes on to point out that much of the fiction that appears in the smaller journals is written in a kind of echo chamber, with MFA-laden writers scouring the pages of stories written by other MFAs to find out what sells, then crafting more of the same. These stories feature a kind of creative-writing-school-induced mustiness that might appeal to writers who have emerged from the cocoon-like embrace of a writing workshop where they learned about “the 5 essential elements of dynamic story structure” or “the 3 secrets of building powerful, unforgettable characters.”* But it’s by no means clear that they will appeal to anybody else. Why? Solipsism is rarely appealing to anybody other than the solipsist. As Virginia Woolf said in different circumstances, “life escapes.”

King puts it this way in his essay:

Last year, I read scores of stories that felt … not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers.

And that seems about right to me. Where I would respectfully differ from King’s analysis is in the reason for this kind of story dominating literary journals. King feels that the bottom shelf is to blame. If the organs that publish short fiction are placed out of the easy access of a mass audience, King argues, the only people willing to hunt for them will be those with a vested interest in what they offer: specifically, other writers, who will then begin to reflect in their own writing the same kinds of things they read in the journals. Thus, the echo chamber.

However, there may be a kind of chicken-and-egg effect here. Perhaps the journals’ consignment to the bottom shelf has as much to do with the kinds of stories that get published in them — that is, the “airless,” “show-offy,” and “self-important” kind that King bemoans — as with the dwindling audience. In other words, perhaps King has it backwards. Perhaps it’s not the placement of the journals and the consequent dwindling audience that resulted in the echo chamber. Perhaps it’s the echo chamber that resulted in the dwindling audience and the consequent consignment to the bottom shelf.

This being the case, there is a relatively simple approach that might have some positive effect in luring people back to the short form: stop writing for the echo chamber and start writing for readers. This would not result in an automatic 180-degree reversal of the short story’s fortunes, but it would be a good start. So long as the stories that get accepted for publication in journals continue to feature a parade of empty formalism and pale, self-satisfied navel gazing, the vibrancy that infused the great stories of the past — think Poe, think Faulkner, think Hemingway, think O’Connor, think Cheever — is likely to remain absent, as is the audience for the short form.

*In case you think I’m making these up, I’m not: they are part of what you can learn at what’s being billed as “Writer’s Boot Camp,” a two-day seminar offered by the Toronto Writers’ Centre.

Up in Smoke

Posted 25 August, 2007 in Writing Life | 1 comment

Not according to A. N. Wilson. It’s England’s ban on public smoking.

After “racking [his] brains” to think of a single great writer of the 17th, 18th, 19th, or 20th century who didn’t smoke, Wilson attacks the British government’s capitulation to “health fanatics” who forced the passage of a “bossy and un-English law” prohibiting lighting up in pubs and restaurants.

Tennyson, who only stopped smoking in order to eat and sleep, describes in one of his letters sitting in a pub with a friend and doing very little except “staring smokey babies” at one another.

Nowadays, this harmless experience would cost the publican £1,200, and Tennyson himself £600, while appallingly self-righteous non-smokers at neighbouring tables, rather than being pleased that they had enjoyed a glimpse of the greatest Victorian poet, would be complaining about the fumes which they chose to believe were causing them some kind of damage.

Wilson calls Beryl Bainbridge “heroic” for continuing to light up, but suspects that the anti-smoking legislation may sound the death knell of literature.

My own feeling is that so long as writers are allowed to drink, we’ll be fine. Having said that, I haven’t completed a piece of fiction since I quit the demon weed. Not that there’s a connection there, but …

(Hat tip to Panic for the link.)

On Stifling Writers

Posted 22 August, 2007 in Flannery O'Connor, Writing Life | 2 comments

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers,” said Flannery O’Connor. “My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.”

Good thing O’Connor isn’t around to read a recent YouGov poll reported in the Guardian, which suggested that more Britons — nearly ten percent of those polled — dream of being writers than they do of pursuing any other job or avocation.

In a follow-up blog post on the Guardian’s site, John Crace wonders why:

It’s not even as if writing is that glamorous. You sit alone for hours on end honing your deathless prose, go days without really talking to anyone and, if you’re very lucky, within a year or so you will have a manuscript that almost no one will want to read. Your friends and family will come to dread requests for constructive feedback - which they know really means just saying, “This is far better than Amis or McEwan” - and if, by some small chance, you do land a book deal you will spend the week of publication wondering why your book isn’t piled up at the front of Waterstones and why you haven’t even picked up a single, measly review in the local paper.

Crace suggests that because writing is something that anyone with a basic literacy can do, it’s the one area of creative endeavour that the average person feels (s)he has a shot at breaking into. On the level of individual sentences, Crace posits, it’s often difficult to distinguish between an unpublished amateur and Margaret Forster (Crace’s example, not mine). It’s only with an agglomeration of sentences and paragraphs that a dearth of creativity begins to make itself apparent. Having read slush-pile submissions for a Canadian publisher, and having written manuscript evaluations for dozens of unpublished aspiring novelists, I can fairly safely attest that many of them don’t reach the level of minimum proficiency even on a sentence-by-sentence basis.

Regardless, the seemingly unquenchable desire of John/Jane Q. Public to write the next great forgotten or ignored novel has led to a veritable cottage industry of creative writing classes and writers’ workshops, many of them taught by working writers who need the money to live.

There are always a few people in these classes who have genuine talent. Unfortunately, the net result of the encounter with a creative writing workshop is usually to have whatever spark of originality or vibrancy that exists in their writing systematically beaten out of them; they emerge on the other side as cookie-cutter replicas of existing writers. To quote O’Connor once again: “[S]o many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence.”

And then there are those others: the retirees with time on their hands, the doctors and lawyers and police officers and high-school teachers who feel that their rich life experiences have provided them with the perfect fodder for great fiction, by which one presumes they mean bestselling fiction. Crace’s advice to these people is not to quit their day jobs. O’Connor puts it more vigorously, if less compassionately:

Now in every writing class you find people who care nothing about writing, because they think they are already writers by virtue of some experience they’ve had. It is a fact that if, either by nature or training, these people can learn to write badly enough, they can make a great deal of money, and in a way it seems a shame to deny them this opportunity; but then, unless the college is a trade school, it still has its responsibility to truth, and I believe myself that these people should be stifled with all deliberate speed.

Writers’ Angst

Posted 7 June, 2007 in Writing Life | 2 comments

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.”]