Sunset, Saturday, 19 September 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

I think in raving yesterday about trivial aspects of the writing (and painting) process, I may have missed much of the reason why Sarah Bruce commended Stephen Fry’s post to me in the first place. But that’s what happens to arrogant, self-absorbed, preoccupied, creative people (guilty on three of four counts) – we often miss the point. 

Much of Fry’s post was about how difficult writing usually is. Or, not so much writing itself, but getting it done, putting it all together, and especially when we’re talking about big projects like books. I hope I don’t overstep by quoting this much Fry:

... [M]y friend Douglas Adams ... [pointed] out that the reason I had never managed to finish a novel was that I had never properly understood how difficult, how ragingly and absurdly difficult, it is to do. “It is almost impossibly hard,” he told me. “It is supposed to be. But once you truly understand how difficult it is,” he added, ..., “it all becomes a lot easier.” ... “A writer,” said [Thomas] Mann, “is a person for whom writing is more difficult than for other people.” How liberating that definition is. If any of you ... have ever been put off writing it might well be because you found it so insanely hard and therefore, like me, gave up ..., regretfully assuming that you weren’t cut from the right cloth, that it must come more easily to true, natural-born writers. Perhaps you can start again now, in the knowledge that since the whole experience was so grindingly horrible you might be the real thing after all.

Of course, as one would hope and expect, Fry goes on to say that if you’re encouraged by this and therefore become able to complete your project, it doesn’t guarantee anything about either the quality or the success of the finished product.

I have only one book under my own name – I’m currently in the throes of deciding whether my revision of it is good enough to publish. Aside from that, whether as a ghostwriter or rewrite editor or hybrid designer-producer-writer-editor, I’ve helped others write somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 to 100 books. (I have no idea of the exact number, it could be 71 or 119, because I have little vested in most of the projects and, with a few exceptions, pretty much forget them when they’re done – I don’t even have a list of them anywhere.) I find writing and rewriting intrinsically ‘easy’ but that’s deceptive – this is difficult (?!) to convey, but it’s both a challenging process and one that comes naturally. I tend to discount everything that goes into it. So I can forget the truth of what Fry is saying. But by the time an entire book is about done, one knows just how hard it’s been – especially if money and time are running out! It’s usually excruciating by the end.

I gained a real awareness of the blood, sweat and tears involved in my book-writing jobs a few years ago when I called on an old colleague, Jack Scovil, of Scovil Galen Ghosh literary agency in New York, who was present at the inception of my first assignment in 1973, and asked for advice in negotiating a ghostwriting agreement. Concerning my near-fatal tendency to undercharge, Jack said:

“Don’t forget, it’s you who are going to be doing all the back-breaking work.”

‘Back-breaking’ ... exactly! And ... amen.