When I tell someone that I'm a creative writing major, a common response is, Oh fun! I would be a writer too, if I had more time."" Gee, thanks.
This kind of reaction is certainly not unique to undergraduate writers. Famous professional writers seem to confront this attitude as well. For instance, in her essay ""Still Just Writing,"" Anne Tyler - the author of ""The Accidental Tourist"" and ""Digging to America"" - writes about a fellow mother who asks her if she has found a real job or is still ""just writing.""
Why do so many people seem to think writing - whether it is novels, poetry or short stories - is a simple, breezy task? Maybe it's because, as with most art, the public only sees the end product and not the labored process behind it or because writers strive to make their work appear effortless. However, I think the real culprits are movies: Nothing has done more to create a false impression of what writers do.
Movies certainly skewed my view of what writing was actually like. For example, when I was a girl, I watched the 1994 version of ""Little Women"" - starring Winona Ryder as Jo March - until my eyes nearly fell out and took Jo as my writing role model. Near the end of the movie, a montage shows Jo writing her novel, and it appears to pour out of her in its final version, taking about a week to write. Imagine my shock when I got to college and my first attempt at a story didn't just flow out of me.
I found out real writing was nothing like the big-screen portrayed it. Instead, it was about countless revisions, constructing clean sentences, playing with point of view, focusing plots... I could go on and on.
But it's not just ""Little Women's"" fault. Nearly every author bio-pic portrays writing as the same, effortless task, including Virginia Woolf in ""The Hours,"" James M. Barrie in ""Finding Neverland"" and even ""Shakespeare in Love."" Okay, maybe it's true with Shakespeare. If anyone could have sat down and instantly written a play, it would have been him.
Still, it took me years of experience to realize, in reality, most writing is a lengthy, cumbersome process dependent on hard work that is too boring and awkward to portray on screen. Short-story writer Kelly Link has written about working on just one short story, ""Stone Animals,"" for an entire year. It takes other writers, like Michael Chabon, as long as five or six years to write one novel. Hopefully everyone will remember this and their BS detectors will go off the next time a movie character writes a
book in a matter of days.
The point of all this is certainly not to make anyone feel sorry for writers. Overall, they have one of the best jobs in the world. Still, I think readers will appreciate a book even more if they understand that it's not the product of a muse whispering in the author's ear like movies portray but rather of hard, disciplined work.
Feel like proving Anna wrong? Send her your structured, reasoned and stream-of-consciousness responses to akwilliams1@wisc.edu.
