Writing and Work

[sartorias]

superversive has posted a riff on the difference between hard work and working hard. He says, in part:

A pernicious belief is making the rounds, encouraged by some of the great gurus of self-publishing and self-promotion. The idea is that you have to pay your dues as a writer, by writing some set quantity (some say 500,000 words, some say a million) of

Comments

[asakiyume]

What an excellent essay that was--such a pleasure to read, so well expressed, and lots of good stuff in there. I'm glad you linked to it!

[sartorias]

Lots of good unconscious stuff made conscious, I thought.

[asakiyume]

Yeah, he untangles a lot of stuff that often unwittingly gets lumped together. Plus, he's funny. I liked imagining mice trying to build a pyramid.

[kalimac]

Given the old saw that a good writer has to get half a million, or a million, bad words out of himself or herself before becoming the good writer of their potential, the fallacy is this: that anyone who gets those bad words out will become a good writer at the end of it. No, it only works if you already have that potential. (Whether that potential is detectable before the bad words are written I'll leave to the writing instructors.)

I think the implication that the fallacy is more of a "broken clock is right twice a day" one, that if you squeeze out enough words some of them are bound to sell, is a different mental concept, not directly related to the above saw.

[caper_est]

Worse than that: if the N bad words are produced by somebody content to produce bad words because that is supposed to be part of the process, then all we know about the N+1th word is that it's produced by someone who has diligently and painstakingly acquired the habit of writing badly.

Acquiring that habit is not, to put it mildly, a move up the mountain.

[kalimac]

Yes. You have to know why you're producing those bad words; what they're for. They're not just ritual obeisance.

[3rdragon]

But imagine how many editors you would need to sort through all the lorem ipsum to find the Shakespeare!