Deromanticizing the Writer
“Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation.’ You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle.’ All that matters is what you leave on the page.”
— Zadie Smith
I love this idea from Zadie Smith. It brings the “life of a writer” down from that idealistic place in the clouds and urges us to look at writing for what it is — work.
Writing is hard, brutal work that takes lots of patience, lots of endurance, and lots and lots of time. It’s easy to forget this when we read effortless prose or get swept up in magical stories. I was recently reminded of this when one of the members of OneRoom’s novel writing program, Emma, finished the first draft of her book. I love what she said to her coach, Laura, when she finally finished her first draft:
“Hi Laura — well I did it and I want to thank you so much for your continued encouragement and wise words.
I’m soooo desperate to get on with it now I have my draft — good lord I honestly didn’t think I’d even ever get to utter those words .
So thank you so much for all the arse kicking — all the encouragement and for your skilled way of stopping my silly romantic ideals of what I thought a writer was (which were stopping me actually writing!) and just getting me to think like a nuts and bolts writer.
It worked!”*
Emma is the mom of two teens and a toddler. She works a day job. When she joined OneRoom, she had just started working on her very first novel. With her coach, she identified motivation and time as two of her main roadblocks to writing. But after working and talking with her coach, they both discovered that the root cause of her writer’s block was actually her preconceived ideas of what a writer should be. Once Emma was able to put away those “silly romantic ideals of what [she] thought a writer was”, she was able to just focus on the work. And once she was able to just focus on the work, she found the time and the determination to write the first draft of a novel. It took her 10 months of hard and dedicated work to get there, but she stuck with it and the work paid off.
So what do I take from Emma’s story? Two things. One, don’t romanticize writing. It’s the work that matters. And two, sometimes it’s crucial to have someone who has been there to remind you and encourage you, and to slap your wrist when you go to unrealistic places.
*Emma is a member of our novel writing program, and currently works with one of our coaches. She gave us permission to quote her and use her name.
