A piper, piping away…” Much of writing is a slog. The secret, many authors will assure you, is arseglue. Some will tell you it’s a job, like any other job.
Maybe it is. There are times, as with anything else, when, you have to face sheer slog. When writing seems just as mundane as cleaning toilets or filling in forms. “Its a job.”
No.
Just NO.
Yes, I do know some people who just formulaically churn it out. Yes, I myself am a plotter. I start with, as often as not, an end (I often come to somewhat different one). But seriously, if it were ‘just a job’ a way to earn a living — I’d pick a better one. I don’t want to tall poppy – but I am a very capable man. My fellow Mad Geniuses likewise. There are hundreds of professions they could have taken for ‘just a job’. Most of them pay better, have better benefits and better hours. Almost all are more secure.
I can’t speak for anyone else, and I am very inept at it – to my deepest regret, but I am here to ride the whirlwind, to see, and to breathe and to feel the red sands of a landscape no human ever ventured onto, to hear the beat of dragon’s wings. To know that magic when somehow my words capture that most fragile and elusive thing: love, rage, courage, fear… To make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, to make my heart race, to bring tears to my eyes. With words. Words. Weak and worthless words… Except when they are not. When they reach between us, when they reach INTO us. When they take us out of ourselves.
When you get it right… there is no feeling more satisfying. I spend a LOT of time frustrated that I haven’t, or haven’t quite. And then… and then I find myself looking at a line I wrote, and thinking that for a brief moment I caught and molded star-fire itself. I’m not very good, and I am lucky to have a line or two I feel that way about – as if I had touched and opened a window into something far, far bigger than just the narrative I create. It’s a window into a whole world. I wonder sometimes, if that is really what I am doing — there are certainly other writers whose work leaves me feeling like I was the butler looking in the keyhole to a vast universe. I have just been reading Diana Wynne Jones’s Spellcoats and found myself devasted knowing the author was dead, and I would never know the story of the Piper, or She who raised the Islands…
There are other times when I feel I am cutting a hole – without anesthetic – into myself, for all the world to look at the muscles twitch and blood spurt.
And then there are times when the threads are twisting and dancing… and I reach out and… I don’t know entirely how, make the weave. When tangle resolves, as if it never was chaos incarnate… If it is not magic, but merely sufficiently advanced science, it’s fooling this primitive pretty well. Where do those words and images come from?
It’s these times I blink and say: ‘and I get paid to do this, as well?’ Because the joy and fierce delight fills me to overflowing.
Just a job.
Bah.
I have to earn a living, somehow. It’s a sign that some others liked my writing too, when they pay for my doorway to elsewhere.
But it is not just a job.
Mad Genius Club 
5 responses to ““But he heard, high up in the air,”
Amen. Sing it, brother!
Might be a plot twist, a character insight, a satisfying ending, but mostly it’s simply a bit of language that makes me shiver. Just recently I came up with one phrase I felt I could store away in my personal horde — [of a woman reaching out to stroke in comfort the bare arm of her traumatized husband] “He leaned into her touch as if it were sunshine…”
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” So Samuel Johnson once wrote. Well, there are a lot of blockheads out there, including me. I earn well above median income for a freelance writer, but far, far below what I earn at the day job. Hell, what I will get from Social Security exceeds what I am getting from writing this year. (Although with writing income, Social Security and a pension from a previous day job, I will get by.)
Despite that I was getting ready to quit the day job and write full time a few years back. It would have increased by writing income perhaps 50%. Maybe doubled it, but still I would have been making less than the day job I had when I started working towards that plan.
The only reason I didn’t do that was because another day job came along at the last minute that was one of those super-cool jobs that you dream of all your professional life, So I deferred the dream of being a full-time author. The list of books I want to write before I die is getting longer (even as I finish some of titles on that list) and the time left to write them gets shorter.
But, yeah, no one writes only because it is a job. There are lots of easier ways to make a living, but few as satisfying. Some day that dream day job will expire and I can turn my full attention to that list of books.
Any good job is not a job. I fixed that? I. fixed? that? And they pay me to solve puzzles? For example. But also any job is also a slog. And yes your stories have stabbed me in the imagination plenty of times.
And the heart, and the funny bone . . Dave seems to be very stabby that way . . .
No, it’s not just a job. Obsession, vocation (in the sense of a calling), bad habit, addiction perhaps, but not just a job. The words, the stories will out. I’m blessed that people enjoy them, although sometimes it feels like I’m ripping my heart out and putting it on the page.