Writing and Work You Like

By Greg Luthi, Professor of English and Creative Writing

There’s a quotation from Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy that I include in my creative writing syllabus:  “Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive.  It will cost you your life.”  I hope it will resonate with my students, especially the ones who want to be professional writers.  Impatience tends to be a characteristic of many of these aspiring writers; the idea seems to be that if they put in a few years of apprenticeship, it’s only fair that they graduate to mastery status and sign a book contract.  It’s not so easy, of course, and in fact I would argue that the apprenticeship never ends.  And that’s not a bad thing at all.

            In his essay “Nickeled and Dime to Life,” Mark Browning develops an apt metaphor comparing education to the acquiring of nickels and dimes.  It’s an “incremental thing”; there’s no single payout.  So too is the process for writing.  To shift the metaphor, there’s no moment when, after a period of struggle, you learn to ride the bike and it becomes automatic.  As my dissertation director once told me, “With each new story you write, you have to learn to ride the bike again.”  Put yet another way, if a writer is serious about his craft, he will never arrive at a destination; he’s too engaged in the journey, the process of writing, trying to write as well as he possibly can.  He may publish books and win awards, but the challenge to improve remains inherent in the writing.  Even if one of my students achieved immediate success by publishing a best-selling novel, what then?  What does he do for the rest of his life?  He continues to write for the challenge of writing and the pleasure and satisfaction of meeting those challenges.  I won’t deny the exhilaration that comes with publishing.  But that exhilaration is fleeting.  The real pleasure comes in the doing.  I sometimes wonder if we think of dedication in a pejorative sense, requiring too much work and sacrifice.  But dedication implies a willingness to commit oneself, and that willingness arises from the pleasure gained by doing.

Dashiell Hammett once wrote, “Honest work is work you like.”  I hope my students will find writing to be honest work, work they will spend a lifetime doing.  It will be worth the cost.