This is the fourth part of a five-part series. Here are Parts One, Two and Three.

Writing Is Hard Work: Or Is It?

We all know how to deal with misconceptions, don't we? Just give the befuddled individual a breezy correction, maybe a condescending pat on the head, and the mistake'll go right away.

Only half the time it isn't so easy, because the misconceptified, if I can call them that, do not set out deliberately to be confused. They genuinely believe their mistakes in good faith, which is why undeceiving them is often a tricky and delicate task. Not only that, but the most deep-seated superstitions almost always contain, at their core, a kernel of good sense or a seed of truth. It is this germ, surrounded by layer after layer of falsehood and misunderstanding, that allows the lie to stick in the stomachs of so many.

The lie pervasive in almost the entire literary world is this: that writing is hard work. That the harder and slower the work is, the more suffering poured into it, the better the writing will be.

You see this attitude reflected by literally everyone. By high-school English teachers, by drama sophomores, by starry-eyed playgoers, and, of course, by the writers themselves, sending down their hole-riddled combat reports from the heights of Mount Olympus, doing desperate battle with the fickle gods.

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

~Ernest Hemingway

Is that so, Papa Hemingway? Well, the Paris Review did, in fact, run an article on Hemingway himself back in 1951, and in the process the interviewer caught concrete evidence of the legendary writer's daily wordcounts.

"He keeps track of his daily progress—“so as not to kid myself”—on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard packing case and set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head. The numbers on the chart showing the daily output of words differ from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so he won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream."

~George Plipton, interviewing Hemingway for The Art Of Fiction No. 21, 1951

450, 575, 462, 1250, 512... hold on a minute.

Those aren't very high, are they? Where's the blood?

Now, don't get me wrong - I respect Hemingway's accomplishments greatly, and his journalistic style is without a doubt one of the most perfect examples of terse, spare, and impactful writing we have today. However, it's one thing to claim that writing is so desperately hard that you have to bleed for it, and another to put in slightly more effort just so you can spend the next day having a nice break from all that tiresome writing.

1250 words. Consider the average typing speed of 40 words per minute. With allowance for the clunkiness of a typewriter, let us reduce this to a glacial 20 words per minute.

Even at that brain-dead speed, writing 1250 words would take... just about an hour and two minutes.

The great pulp masters of the 1930s did in fact break their hands, pounding out thousands of words an hour. Did Papa Hemingway really have the right, standing at his Royal Quiet Deluxe, eye half-fixed on his fishing gear in the corner, to say that blood was absolutely pouring from his fingers?

Does that seem like hard work to anyone at all?

Now, one can argue that the editing was hard work, that agonizing over the choice of words made Hemingway the great and revered author that he is.

Is crossing out a few words really agony?

Hemingway came into the writing world from journalism. He knew what it meant to write prolifically, speedily, and to a deadline. Not only that, but he had a marked tendency to brag, cheat, and lie whenever his self-esteem came under pressure, as multiple accounts and even his own letters attest. Every bit of correspondence we have from him suggests that he was a profoundly insecure man despite his great gifts, willing to challenge another man to a boxing match despite his own profound lack of pugilistic experience, and constantly harping in his diaries over how much woman writers like Gertrude Stein would secretly like to copulate with him.

In his lifetime, Hemingway produced seven novels, six collections of short stories, and two works of non-fiction. Posthumously, we have from him three novels, four collections of short stories, and three autobiographical works.

If this braggadocio of a man, working two or three hours a day at most, managed to give us several classics of the English language, imagine how much more he could have given us if he had simply worked for eight like everyone else!

Stephen King, one of the most popular authors of our time, sets himself a daily quota of three thousand words. He wakes up in the wee hours of the morning and does nothing but write until the limit is hit, and then spends the rest of the day doing what he wishes. He has not broken this habit for decades, save for brief periods of severe hospitalization.

Stephen King is seventy years old. He has published fifty-four novels, six works of non-fiction and around two hundred short stories. He continues to work as we speak.

Who, in your opinion, is the harder worker? Who has bled more at the typewriter?

The truth at the heart of the lie is that to an untrained novice, writing is incredibly hard. One stutters and grasps for words that refuse to come, snatches at the edges of mist and half-remembered whispers.

Whether or not this mental effort can be reasonably translated to real blood, real sweat and real tears is another matter, and at any rate, it is alleviated with practice.

Yes, practice.

As Dean Wesley Smith, bestselling author and speed demon, says in his blog on the matter:

Fiction writers are people who sit alone in a room and make up stuff. By its very nature, one of the easiest tasks ever given to a human being. But, alas, fiction writers are people who make stuff up, and thus, making stuff up doesn’t stop when our fingers leave the keys. We use words like “struggle” and “fought” in sentences describing the creation of a story. “I had to really struggle with that story.” Or “I fought that story into existence.”

Good, active writing. Who cares if the reality was you sat fairly still, in a comfortable chair, in a warm room, at a computer, and just made stuff up.

...I sit alone, in a room, and make stuff up. That’s my job description. I have, without a doubt, the easiest and best job in the world.

It is a giant myth that my job is hard work.

~Dean Wesley Smith, Killing The Sacred Cows of Publishing: Writing Is Hard

Sitting in a chair and making stuff up is not hard work. If you believe otherwise, then please, buckle up.

I am a flutist. I have spent ten years of my life learning how to blow into a silver tube with holes in it. When I first began, the flute felt like lead in my hands. I could barely get a squeak out. It took me no less than twenty minutes to get a sound even approximating a note. My teacher gave me a simple piece to play, consisting of the same three notes over and over. You may know it: the tune is called Mary Had A Little Lamb.

Now I was in fact able to play that tune after a week or two. But imagine if I was utterly convinced that it wasn't so easy. That in fact, music was much harder than I was giving myself credit for. That I had, in fact, just dashed that off, and that the performance couldn't possibly have been good at all. That I didn't deserve to move on like my teacher said.

Imagine if I proceeded to play Mary Had A Little Lamb for the next year, working on every single note as much as I could, striving to make it absolutely perfect.

I might have been able to play it really well come December. I might have had every note perfect, in fact - all three of them. But it wouldn't have helped my musicianship one bit, because in music one learns by playing a variety of pieces, and not mindlessly repeating a single tune.

Naturally, if I'd decided that playing as fast as my teacher was impossible to begin with, I would have given up and sold the flute. Suffice to say that those fears did not come to pass.

"But Troy," you stutter, "that's, um... obvious."

Exactly. So why doesn't the same thing apply to writing?

Why do we automatically assume that anything labored over is good, and anything written at speed is bad? Don't we thrill and applaud when musicians play fast?

If Stephen King can reliably produce three thousand words a day by sheer force of habit, and Hemingway can write, say, one thousand two hundred and fifty words a day because he wants to go out fishing the next day, then what, pray, makes Hemingway more of a writer than King?

I mean, it's plain to see who's writing more. Isn't it?

Do you really think you can't do it?

####

Before we start this postscript, I'd like to thank everyone for your tremendous response to Part Three of this series. You've really cemented my faith in Steemit, and I can't thank you guys enough. My name's Troy Tang, and in this series, I'm trying to tackle the myths and misconceptions which prevented me from writing. If you've gotten this far, thank you very much. If there's a lack of real concrete advice, I promise I'll rectify that soon enough, perhaps in another series - I'm trying to tackle thinking more than anything, and at any rate I don't have much in the way of a process. But more on that later.

If you liked this part, then please stay tuned for the next and final installment. Thank you so much for reading!