Writing Without the Hard Grind
Of all the things that Ernest Hemingway never said, one of the most widely-shared must be this: ‘There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.’
This misattributed quote is popular amongst writers. You can find it all over the internet. But it is bad advice. Taken metaphorically, bleeding is a poor metaphor for writing. Taken literally, you are going to make one hell of a mess of your typewriter.
But if the quote is popular, it is because it plays into the deep-rooted cultural myth that to write well involves self-inflicted misery. There is a great cartoon in the New Yorker that plays on this myth. A man on a rack says to his torturer, ‘Don’t talk to me about suffering — in my spare time, I’m a writer.’
Because this myth is so prevalent, it can sometimes seem as if writing well and living well are incompatible: as if writers are caught in a zero-sum game. If you want to write well, you have to suffer, exhaust yourself, diminish your life. If you want to live well and happily, then your writing will suffer.
But none of this is true.
I’m currently in the middle of a large-scale book project. Before my end of October deadline, there’s a lot to be done: research, drafting, redrafting, staring out of the window, emails to my editor. Ideally, I will get to the end…
