Work, Craft and Frivolity

by Janis Patterson

I honestly don’t know whether to be flattered, or insulted, or sorry.

Right now I’m fighting a tight deadline for a book, and it is fighting back tooth and nail. I’m way short of where I should be with characters who, despite pre-planned expected actions/reactions/events, are stubbornly refusing to cooperate. It’s an unsettling feeling.

Looking for moral (or immoral, depending on how you might view it) support I called a writer friend expecting commiseration and encouragement.

Instead I got a breathless little laugh and a frivolous “Oh, that’s nothing. You’ll get something together to get it done. You always do” before she went on to talk at length about this party she was giving for her granddaughter’s wedding.

Now I have known and loved her granddaughter since her toddler days, and am delighted she is getting married… but at that moment I needed some support and encouragement, not punch recipes.

Plus, it is almost insulting to my craft to believe that I’ll get it done just as I would a cake or a floral decoration or any other mechanical project. Writing is an art. It is something to be taken seriously instead of a frivolous chore that can be dashed off on a whim.

In the bad old early days of romance writing, there was a popular belief held by far too many that writing was easy, that romance writers just reclined on a chaise longue, occasionally munching on a bon-bon while effortlessly spewing out another best seller between their morning horseback ride and a ball at the mansion down the road that evening.

Now that is an exaggeration (although less than you might think) but the kernel of that idea, that writing is an easy cinch which takes no time and less thought and no work at all, is still lurking about our industry like a wraith that cannot be exorcised.

In case you ever thought that, take my word – it is not true. Writing is work. Even writing a bad book is work. Writing a good book is difficult and a lot of work. To denigrate the process by saying with flip dismissal “That’s nothing, you’ll get it done” when you are asking for help and encouragement and support is not only insulting to the writer, but to the craft itself.

Writing is more than pulling words out of the air and putting them into a line. A chimpanzee can do that. The words have to make at least some sort of sense and create some sort of vaguely cohesive story; most writers – even the very bad ones can do that, though there are some I would put the chimps up against any day.

To create a real book, though, you have to work. You have to take a thousand ideas and melt them together into a seamless, interesting whole. You have to choose the right words to create the world of your book with just the ambiance and subtext you want. And most important of all, you have to make this book into something that people you have never met, people who have never heard of you, want to read.

That’s not easy, and it should not be frivolously dismissed as if it were.

End of rant. I have a book to write.