The Words of Chabon

The Writer’s Guilt will be posted in a day or so, but in the meantime, here is a quote from Michael Chabon, an author that I am have great respect for. I discussed earlier about a seemingly lax take on writing. To clarify, I don’t want you to think that you shouldn’t take it seriously, only that you shouldn’t force yourself to write to the determent of your enjoyment of writing. Mr. Chabon offers the following take (this is quoted from a Wikipedia entry, taken from an interview given with The New York Times. The journalist in me tried to find a corroborating source for the quote, but couldn’t. Regardless, here it is):

There have been plenty of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years,
but writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every
day. If you want to write novels, they take a long time, and they're big, and
they have a lot of words in them....[T]he best environment, at least for me, is
a very stable, structured kind of life.

For what it’s worth, and for all that it seems to contradict my original statement, I do agree with this author’s point of view. Writing novels is a serious business and you can’t just type it out over a single weekend. It takes weeks and months and sometimes years to get your tome just right. And even then, you’ll find something about it you don’t like, something you wish you were smart enough or talented enough to fix. Thing of it is, I think that whether you write every day for an hour, several times a week or only on weekends, you have to be committed to your prose. There will be lots of instances where you are tempted to chuck the whole thing, and that is the true test. Do you love writing enough to continue. Is your story important to you. Are the characters begging you to tell them what happens next.

To be able to push through is essential and Michael Chabon knows this. Do you need to keep a strict schedule like Mr. Chabon to work through the tough times or to prove that you are a “serious writer”? No, and every writer, no matter their success, will give you a different idea of what their schedule, or non-schedule, is like. But there is one thing they all share, novice and professional alike. We all write when the mood strikes us, when the words are flowing so fast from your brain that your fingers work overtime to keep up with them.

Writing is work, but it is something we do because we love a good book, each compelling chapter, every descriptive paragraph, all the well-constructed sentences and the singular beauty of a word used in just the right place.