Writers love to grouse about how hard writing is. They seem to enjoy it much more than writing whatever it was they were supposed to be working on in the first place, as if they have to get off their chest how arduous the journey of the literati is before actually getting down to work. Here’s a sample menu of writerly woes: The terror of the blank page. The loneliness of solitary work. The haunting specter of perfectionism. The elusiveness of trying to narrow the infinite possibility of language into finite strands of words that convey meaning through the fine-grained emotional nuance of lived experience.
“Writing is hard” is a cliché. And writers should avoid clichés. But like all clichés, it’s also true. Writing is the thorniest thicket I crawl into on a regular basis. I’m with Dorothy Parker here: “I hate writing; I love having written.” I mean, reading my old columns can be fun—if not cringey, like many a backward glance—but writing them is not pleasurable. Playing chew toy tug of war with Clancy is fun. Typing away at these keys, trying to structure the swirling chaos of my mind into coherence, it’s not painful, it’s just, well, difficult. (There are consolations, of course, as Rick Bass notes about the writing process: “Your senses are so acutely engaged that it seems the tips of cell receptors glow incandescent; you burn, yet without damage—there is only illumination, exhilaration: the moment, caught in the web of five senses and deepest specificity.” On a good day, anyway.)
But don’t take my word on it. Writers also love to write about how difficult the activity is. Children’s author Amy Joy puts it this way: “Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.” Legendary editor Robert Gottlieb, who wrote half a dozen books himself, noted in his memoir, Avid Reader: “There are editors who will always feel guilty that they aren’t writers. I can write perfectly well—anybody who’s educated can write perfectly well. But I dislike writing: it’s very, very hard and I just don’t like the activity.” (I feel so seen by this quote that it feels targeted.)
My favorite metaphor in the hallowed litany of literary whingeing is from David Rakoff, a frequent contributor to “This American Life” who died in 2012: “Writing is like pulling teeth. From my [redacted anatomical appendage].”
I was so taken with Rakoff’s horrifically vivid, percussive vulgarity—which manages to capture the self-directed outrage of choosing to tilt at windmills—that I decided to try my hand at a writing-is-hard metaphor involving [redacted anatomical appendages]. Here goes: Writing is like looking for a [redacted anatomical appendage] in a bag of [redacted anatomical appendages] and realizing halfway through that you don’t like sorting through [redacted anatomical appendages] very much and you wonder why you ever thought sorting through [redacted anatomical appendages] was a good idea in the first place.
Not as good as Rakoff’s quip, admittedly.
Of course, there’s delightful counterprogramming as well from within the writing community: “Writing is hard for every last one of us,” writes Wild author Cheryl Strayed. “Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”
Speaking of digging, here’s Chuck Wendig, author of The Book of Accidents, who tries to find a middle road between acknowledging the difficulty of the endeavor and not letting a fairly privileged group of knowledge workers off the hook either: “Why is it hard digging ditches? Why is it hard being a god? Writing is somewhere in between both of those. You’re the god of digging ditches. You’re navigating this interstitial terrain between art and craft, between self-actualization and commerce, between empathy and evil. It has all these rules, and almost none of them are true.”
“All these rules” that Wendig speaks of: The world is overpopulated by books of them, from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style to Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing and Constance Hale’s Sin and Syntax. I recall that a key takeaway from Strunk and White was to be judicious in one’s deployment of exclamation points because overuse would cause loss of impact and create reader fatigue. I wonder what they would think of any given email written in the course of workday:
Subject Line: Let’s Get Stapled!
Hi Sandy!
Just heard from Brad in Accounting! The PO was approved! We’re good to buy that stapler! Can’t wait to see your report!
Making shit happen!
Jim-Ellen!
Of course, we have our own house rules at Chronogram. Fifteen of them, in fact. I won’t bore you with them all, but here’s a taste:
Rule #14: Don’t Use the Word “Unique”
Strictly speaking, unique means “being one a kind,” not “unusual.” Unique is usually employed as hyperbole, esp. in a marketing context, and should be avoided. Even if something is one in a million, it is not unique—just rare, as there are two in two million. The word unique has become so devalued through its misuse as to be meaningless. One of a kind or singular work just as well.
Nitpicky and pretentious? Certainly. But not wrong.
Writers also love to give advice about how to be the best writer you can be. The first rule of writing is “write what you know,” so the following logic prevails: Writers know how to write; therefore, they should write about writing. Which is to be expected, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t insufferable—all these writers trying to ram advice down our throats.
There’s Joyce Carol Oates: “Most important for a writer is to read widely, enthusiastically. Writing is a consequence of reading and writing well is a consequence of reading well.” Or Stephen King: “A radio talk-show host asked me how I wrote. My reply—’One word at a time’—seemingly left him without a reply. I think he was trying to decide whether or not I was joking. I wasn’t.” Or David Mitchell: “Neglect everything else.”
And there’s always a bull market for writerly advice. The legions of us who burn to communicate with these clunky word clusters do need help. Despite how hard it is, we are foolish enough to sit down to it time and again. But eventually the old alchemy begins again, the transformation of mind into matter and matter into meaning. Knowing when to stop is part of the trick of it all, resting the pen on the pockmarked page a kind of final magic.
This article appears in February 2024.
