Writing Tips

Work

An Element of Fiction

Work, and especially hard work, is an elaboration on and a first cousin to Revision. Yes, it is work, and yes, it is hard work. But it can also be very enjoyable work; you are, after all, polishing your gems.

This is another element I was surprised to find has occupied so much thought among writers and teachers.

Let’s ease into this via John Steinbeck, “I don’t suppose writing consists in anything more than doing it… Just a matter of doing the daily stint.”

And Charles Baudelaire, “Inspiration is to work every day.”

How about J.M.W. Turner, the painter, “The only secret I have got is damned hard work.”

And John Gregory Dunne, “The professional guts a book through… in full knowledge that what he is doing is not very good. Not to work is to exhibit a failure of nerve, and a failure of nerve is the best definition I know for writer’s block.”

This Latin proverb fits the bill, “If there is no wind, row.”

Pragmatic Samuel Beckett, “Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Rick Demarinis puts it nicely though, “Writing isn’t hard work; writing is hard play.”

And a very wise word from Ursula K. Le Guin, “Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work.”

Back to Steinbeck, “In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration… I must get the words down every day whether they are any good or not.

“The failure of will even for one day has a devastating effect on the whole, far more important than just the loss of time and wordage. The whole physical basis of the novel is discipline of the writer, of his material, of the language.

“I can do it and I will do it, by God. It is just the discipline that is all.”

Normal Mailer tends to agree, “The main difference between an experienced and an inexperienced writer is the ability to work on a bad day.”

“It’s axiomatic but worth remembering,” says Philip Gerard. “Nobody writes a book. What you write every day is a piece of a book, a fragment, a scene.”

“Writing is hard work,” says William Zinsser. “A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.”

As for William Sloane, “Anyone who tries to write clearly and deeply about what he finds some part of the human experience to be like, in thought and in feeling, soon finds out that writing is hard, frustrating work.”

Pat Conroy’s take, “Writing is both hard labor and one of the most pleasant forms that fanaticism can take.”

And how about Ernest Hemingway on Baudelaire, “Since the good old days when Charles Baudelaire led a purple lobster on a leash through the same old Latin Quarter, there has not been much good poetry written in cafes. Even then I suspect that Baudelaire parked the lobster with the concierge down on the first floor, put the chloroform bottle corked on the washstand and sweated and carved at the Fleurs du Mal alone with his ideas and his paper as all artists have worked before and since.”

He goes on to say, “There’s no rule on how it is to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it is like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”

William Vollmann has a nice take, “Honest effort for its own sake is beauty.”

Stephen King’s advice, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcuts.”

Says Flannery O’Connor about your typewriter (laptop, these days), “Don’t do other things. Sit at your machine.”

She then goes on to elaborate, “It is my considered opinion that one reason you are not writing is that you are allowing yourself to read in the time set aside to write. You ought to set aside three hours every morning in which you write or do nothing else; no reading, no talking, no cooking, no nothing, but you sit there. If you write all right and if you don’t all right, but you do not read; whether you start something different every day and finish nothing makes no difference; you sit there. It’s the only way, I’m telling you. If inspiration comes you are there to receive it, you are not reading. And don’t write letters during that time. If you don’t write, don’t do anything else. And get in a room by yourself. If there are two rooms in that house, get in the one where nobody else is. I will not tell you anything interesting to read as you have no business throwing away your time in that fashion.

“I’m a full-time believer in writing habits, pedestrian as it all may sound. You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away.

“Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing… Not having something under way is worse than having something under way.”

John le Carré weighs in with, “I am an absolute monk about my work. I believe it’s like being an athlete, you’ve got to find which are the best hours of the day. I am a morning person… I’ll start at four-thirty, five in the morning and go through to lunchtime.”

“The creative power,” says Virginia Woolf, “which bubbles so pleasantly in the beginning of a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of impending shape keep one at it more than anything.

“What is essential is to write fast and not break the mood — no holiday, no interval if possible, till it is done. Then rest. Then re-write.”

John Fowles, however, seems to differ, “I don’t write if I don’t want to, if I don’t feel like it. Sometimes it can be very difficult. Other writers call it a block, but I hate that word. I simply wait till the muse comes.

“Usually when I’m into a narrative the problem becomes physical. The story begins to pour out of me. I wrote a novel two years ago in eighteen days, working sixteen to eighteen hours a day. It can be done. On this narrative, first draft stretch, I work just as long as I want and can.”

“Writing is something that you never do as well as it can be done,” says Hemingway. “It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done — so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well.”

This from Don DeLillo, “I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle — it’s a nice kind of interlude. Then I work again, later afternoon, for two or three hours.”

And how about this incredible observation from Calvin Coolidge, “Press on. Nothing can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; the world is full of unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

Let’s leave it at that.

© Wolfstuff