“It takes just as much work to write a bad book as it does a good one.” Gary Draper said this in passing during a lecture on, I think, Wacousta or The Temptations of Big Bear…I’ve forgotten the details of that lecture as it’s several years ago now that I took his Early Canadian Literature class at St. Jerome’s. I’ve long since graduated and Dr. Draper has since retired. But I don’t think I will ever forget this sentence.
I often wish I could, though. I write very slowly. I’m the sort of person who can’t write a paragraph and edit it later. I neurotically polish each sentence before writing the next one, all the while knowing that I will be going back to revise it later, probably several times. A one page press release or book review can take me several afternoons if I have the leisure—which I don’t, typically—thank god for deadlines! The idea that someone might invest this level of labour into an entire book, only to discover once it was finished that it wasn’t any good was, well, devastating to my twenty year-old self. How can someone work at something for that long and not, you know, know they’re not good at it?
In the years prior to showing up for that class, I put a respectable amount of effort into a whole bunch of things that I wasn’t any good at. Based on a series of failures, frustrations, and mostly kind if not terribly positive feedback, I suspected that I had no natural gift for the clarinet, baking, wood-working, or team sports of any kind. I quit all of those things without a second thought, priding myself on my excellent self-awareness—eg, for recognizing the difference between something I had a natural gift for versus something I had zero natural gift for—and thus not wasting time stubbornly struggling to master something at which I’d never really excel or enjoy.
However, after that class, I got to wondering about how much work it takes me to write something, and thus questioning how accurate a measure I had of my own talents. Was I just lazy? Would I have to write an entire book to find out that my writing skills are on par with my dodgeball skills? Should I quit now and give knitting or French another shot?
This was almost ten years ago now, yet I haven’t quite gotten over it. I have eliminated laziness, though. I am pretty lazy, but I’m not afraid of hard work. I’ll happily scrub floors, clean closets or run a mile, knowing there’s something I can show at the end, even if it’s something as inconsequential as a shiny floor under my feet. What I’m very afraid of hard work for naught. That is, I’m terribly attached to the results of my efforts, no matter what arena—the gym, the kitchen, my desk here at TNQ.
This devastating little sentence, “it’s just as much work to write a bad book as it is a good one,” floats to the forefront of my mind when I sit down to write. It’s like a mantra, more like an anti-mantra actually, that convinces me to quit rather than keep going. I can push past it if I have a deadline⎯but if not, well, most often not.
So… I suspect I’m not entirely alone in this, but that some of you talented writers out there have found a way to combat this issue. Please, do tell…
What's new at TNQ?
Share the love!
Subscribe
Follow us on Twitter
Join us on Facebook
Authors
Categories
Links
I think I understand the sentiment behind the “bad book is as much work as a good book”, but after a point, I disagree. I don’t think that anyone deliberately sets out to write a bad book, but people DO set out to write a good book.
So, we dash off a first draft, reflect on it and tear it all apart, rewrite, rewrite again, and obsessively look at the work over and over. Then we show it to other people, listen to their valued opinions and biases, and rewrite it again. Some writers dash off a draft very quickly, and others work methodically toward the end by starting at the beginning. I happen to be a more stream-of-consciousness writer, but become a ruthless editor once I snap out of my writing trance.
So far, I am unpublished, which certainly does not qualify me to be considered any expert on writing, but it’s only a matter of time and effort until I get a first short story published somewhere.
Until then, I look at my stories as works in progress. I try to compare the stories to wet oil paintings, where I rub out elements and then paint them back in, or darken and lighten the tones and colours in relation to each other until the whole work is in some sort of intriguing and pleasing harmony. It all takes time and effort.
I have come to accept that I will always be mediocre at some things in life. I have strengths and weaknesses. I am not a good water skiier, and when I tried learning acoustic guitar, the strings just had nothing to say. It was all work and no play.
But back to the stories, those unpublished ones. I care for the characters, and what they are doing and struggling with in these stories. The characters live inside my head, depending on me to get the details right, so they can live for others. And THEY care whether they are in a bad or good story. So I keep learning and working on writing, so the results of hard work will get out there, and will be good.
Gary Draper is right! If you feel compelled to write, however, you just will, despite everything. I’m not convinced I’ll ever KNOW that what I’m working on is good, before or during, though after, long after, I might feel relieved to find that something has held. Life is risky. If you only did things you knew you’d be good at, where would you go, and what would you do? Besides, hard work does matter. It might not turn you into a literary genius, but if you practice a craft like writing for a solid decade, with some measure of critical self-awareness, you’re likely to be at least somewhat better at it at the end of that exploration than you were at the beginning. The question is, who are you asking to measure this improvement? What’s good, anyway? I remember GG-winner David Gilmour describing novel-writing as “a blood-bath.” I agree. It’s an emotional time-consuming doubt-ridden blood-bath. You do it despite that. You do it because you feel driven, because it’s a compulsion, because you can’t not do it.
Alan, Carrie, thank you for weighing in so reassuringly — my problem is, I start something and I think it’s wonderful for a while…then I get to that point where I start to doubt its wonderfulness, I convince myself that I shouldn’t waste the time, etc. I can’t quite push past that stage of the process and finish a draft anyway unless, of course, I am forced to by a deadline. How on earth do you guys–does any writer—do that? Internal fortitude? Alcohol? Stubbornness? As for what happens when you only do the things you’re good at…I know what happens. You’re safe, comfortable, successful … but eventually, quite deeply bored. How you deal with that depends on your personality…
Yes, in my case it is stubbornness, pure and simple. That, coupled with a nagging sense of what has been left undone. The spirit of the unfinished story sits in my writing room. It accompanies me to the supermarket. It reminds me in the middle of the night.
Draper’s contention seems poorly supported. What was his evidence? His sample size? How many “bad” books had he observed in gestation, vice “good” books?
To arrive at a valid conclusion, we would need to first devise a measure of labour (including such metrics as chair-butt-hours per manuscript page, number of abortive pages flown as airplanes divided by number of abortive pages crumpled and thrown in anger, draft pages discarded per final page, number of times partner snarled at for no apparent reason, and rate of apology for said snarling), and then correlate that with manuscript quality (being based on such objective measures as number of Ukrainian grandmothers, rate and intensity of Muskoka chair brooding, and number of eavestroughs clogged with discarded toques).
My hypothesis is that we’d find a lot of labour going into a bad book, but even more going into a good one. All good books start life as bad drafts; I think what we mistakenly call “talent” is the ability to recognize their faults and improve them.
At least, I certainly hope so.
For me, the work is what is important. I am in love with the processing of writing a poem. Even when I feel a piece is not going particularly well, I cannot leave it alone until I have exhausted my options. I am wrestling with the angel and sometimes the angel wins. I think of what Ted Hughes said of Sylvia Plath working on her poems: that if she couldn’t get a table out of it, she was more than happy with a chair or a toy. This is the way it is with me. A lovely poem by W.S. Merwin called “Berryman” about his poetry mentor John Berryman from his collected poems Migration also comes to mind when I think about this topic. Here are the last two stanzas:
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write
Keep up the blog! You guys are doing wonderful things.
Cheers,
Chris
Rosalynn, I confess I write the occasional story that never does get “finished.” But the ones that do get finished for a couple of different reasons. Some just come out right to begin with. Most don’t. Most tease at me to figure them out, to make them work. This can take years. I don’t exaggerate. (Though they’re most likely sleeping in the back of my brain during those years). Sometimes it feels like my desire to write stories is a compulsion, or an illness. I realize I’m not describing the process in positive terms, which isn’t fair–at the best of times, writing can feel like dreaming, like traveling inside of a trance. But the overall process is much more obsessive, for me. Honestly, it’s like I cannot help myself. Like I am in a kind of mental pain and distraction till my brain can puzzle its way out. I’m not sure I’d do it otherwise.