I was watching a book event last night when, towards the end of the night, the host asked an interesting question: is writing work? She phrased it differently, but that was the jist of the question. And naturally, it got me to thinking: is it actual work?
Writing is a weird, dark art. Sometimes I’ll sit down with a bowl of chips and a coffee, and before I know it, an hour or two’s gone by and I have 800 words or so, but the coffee and chips have vanished. Who took them? Who wrote those words I can’t remember typing? It’s like the old UFO phenomena of “lost time” except instead of aliens, it’s a book review or something.
Writing is easy. Sometimes I can sit in front of my laptop with a timer and bang out 300 words while freewriting, and sometimes they’re good, too. I’ve had days where a record review, an essay, even a sketch for a story, they come out like water and just flow onto the page. It’s like magic when this happens, and all I can think is “I can do this, it’s easy.”
I have an unpublished story that happened mostly like this: Road Trip1. I wrote it for a class I was taking, and mostly it came to me roughly developed. I knew from the get go what I was aiming for, I even thought I had the ending and it was the spaces in between that needed work. I wrote it in something like a week, working a little bit here and there until I had over 4,000 words and a rough draft I felt happy with.
But mostly, writing is hard. Mostly I’ll sit down and peck away for a few hours and hope that something comes out of it that’s useful. The story I mentioned above was like this, too. Once I had a draft, I posted parts for my class and, well, it wasn’t as good as I thought it was. Isn’t that the way it always goes? So I revised and edited and cut, and this isn’t fun or easy. I rewrote scenes to make characters more clear, I cut others and added to the ending. It wasn’t as fun as writing the draft, but after a few weeks of tweaking here and cutting there, I had something I was proud of. And so it goes.
I remember when I was in college, writing seemed so easy. I was able to bang out stuff for the school newspaper with ease, reviews here and stories there. My ambition at the time was to become a sportswriter, someone with a column in Toronto and maybe even a radio show. I assumed this was completely doable for me, a person going to literally the smallest journalism school in Ontario and making absolutely no connections in the industry.
I loved the feature writing class, which was where I got to really spread my wings and write what we called “enterprise stories” where we’d write something like 10,000 words on stuff we liked. I wrote my first published feature that way, a look at darts in Canada. I talked to my uncle, to a guy who played professional darts in the UK2 and some other people, and managed to land it in a darts trade magazine. They didn’t pay me, but I was too naive to see that as a red flag. I settled for a copy of the magazine instead.
I ran with the idea I could do this because it seemed both easy and natural to me and by the time graduation rolled around, I landed an internship at a national news desk. This was my first lesson in how tough writing actually is. Story after story was rejected, pitches not accepted and stuff I wrote was too long and windy for what they wanted. Eventually, they put me in a closet upstairs where I’d write stuff for their autos page. Me, the person who didn’t even have a driver's license, writing for a cars website that never actually published my features. It was a rough time in my life; they flat out told me I didn’t have a future there and eventually I stopped caring.
A few years later, I ran into my old professor, a nice woman named Anna, who’d helped me land that gig. She assumed from the way they told it, I’d quit writing, and seemed surprised when I was still at it, plugging away at websites here and there.
Writing isn’t work like my day job is. I’ve seen writers on Twitter brag about how they’ve never held a regular job, and then talk about how difficult their days are. Because, writing like 15 point listicles on anime and video games, that’s tough work. Actually, it probably is, and I shouldn’t be snide. But it’s a different kind of tough than, say, lugging a 20 kilogram box of raw chicken is. Or dealing with a drunk customer who insists on calling you a tranny. Or getting hauled up to the office after said customer complained about you to your boss. That’s hard. I have days where when I get home I go right to bed; I have days where when I get home, I can bang out a few hundred words or more. It depends.
But what I’m getting at, is they both are hard kinds of work, and I don’t think one is exactly harder than the other. My day job can be hard; sometimes it’s like putting out a series of fires. It’s physically taxing. But so is writing: finding the right word, making something happen when your brain is clogged, trying to make the character who is so vibrant and alive in your imagination come even close to that on the page… that’s hard. There are days when I wonder if I have the ability or talent to even do this semi-professionally; you’ve probably seen them on Twitter.
I remember reading a Bukowski poem when I was much younger where he gave advice on writing. It was something to the effect of “if it doesn’t come naturally, don’t do it.” Which is good and bad advice at the same time. It’s good because, well, so many people want to be a writer but when it comes time to actually write, it’s hard and they get discouraged. It’s bad because writing isn’t always easy and the work you put in is worth it in the end.
I think about my old editor Austin Kent sometimes, because he was someone who let me write about whatever I wanted, so long as it was about sports, and I had a lot of fun writing for him. I wrote about the meaning behind an athlete’s new haircut (ie: a fresh start); compared the NBA MVP race to a Kurosawa movie3 and used to get linked on blogs all the time. It was a good experience in some ways because it got my fingers moving again after feeling discouraged. In others, well, I wouldn’t recommend stirring up passionate sports fans unless you’ve got a thick skin.
But I’ve drifted from my main point: writing is work, and even if it’s not physical labor, it’s hard on a good day and really hard on a bad one. But it’s also something I feel a compulsion to do: even before college I’d write about stuff on a blog nobody read, just because it was something I felt like I had to do. I have notebooks littering my apartment with half-sketched ideas.
Writing is work, but it’s also fun and, like washing dishes or making a cake, it comes with the bonus of concrete results. I can spend all morning working on something and when I’m done, there’s a thing to look at, to read and to share online. It’s work, but it’s work I enjoy and, hopefully, something I can continue to work at and get better at in the future.
Fingers crossed!
John Part, aka “Darth Maple.” He’d come out to Star Wars music, which was a pretty good gimmick for darts
https://sports.ws/thegp/rose-howard-james-nba-mvp/