Writing is damn hard work. Don’t believe me? What’s the last thing you had published, printed, accepted or distributed to eager readers? I thought so. Here’s a story about the writing job/career/work taken from Judith Barrington’s great writing book, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art: at a party, a writer engaged a surgeon, telling her about his latest published memoir. The doctor said, “You’ve inspired me. I think I’ll take six months off and write my own memoir.” Without skipping a beat, the writer said, “You’ve inspired me. I think I’ll take six months off and become a surgeon.” Writers have a reputation, some of it deserved, of taking our time, dabbling in the art of clashing words, being dilletantes–even knowing what ‘dilletante’ means! (Someone without real commitment who dabbles, basically). We’re seen lazing around in our robes at noon, refusing to engage with the ‘working world,’ never far from a bottle opener or cigarette lighter as we create stories about real people we can’t possibly understand. Writing is black magic. It’s smoke and mirrors. It’s that artsy-fartsy gene. No it’s not: it’s damn hard work putting words together, forming sentences that sing, paragraphs that pulse, stories that satisfy. And there are all those damnably hard happy endings! Jeez, how to make one of those happen in a world filled with chaos, confusion, riots and republicans? It’s almost impossible.

But we do it. When I finished The Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life I dscovered the ultimate challenge for any writer. It’s not how to get published. These days anyone with a laptop and a credit card can get happily (if not qualitatively) published in under an hour. It’s not how to patch the bloody thing together. If you can’t create a cogent, readable manuscript you’re just not a writer, sorry. It’s not the $$$. There are more write-a-book-and-get-famous shysters out there anxious to take a wannabe writer’s $$$ these days than you shake a credit card at. No, it’s simply this. That, like John Ciardi once said about his poetry, “I’m always afraid there’s a part of it I left inside my head.” Writers struggle to write, and it’s damn hard work, and we always hope, like the surgeon extracting a tumor, that we got it all. In the meantime, go away, leave us alone. We have work to do.

Thanks to Shanan Haislip, The Procrastiwriter, for the inspiration today, and for the picture. Gotta get one of those mugs.