Writing is Work

I haven't yet reached the point of exasperation that William Burroughs describes as "the temptation to tear up your work in little pieces and throw it in someone else's wastepaper basket." It demands patience and solitude from the writer who wants to write well. The compulsion to spend hours writing can deform a normal life. Not to mention, there is the constant question of whether my writing will be any good, or whether I will succeed enough to be able to do it in the first place. Those are the moments when it can help to read the lives and letters of great writers. Isaac Babel has this to say about the hard labor of revision:

I work like a pack mule, but it's my own choice. I'm like a galley slave who is chained for life to his oar, but who loves the oar. Everything about it. I go over each sentence time and again. I start by cutting all the words it can do without. You have to keep you eye on the job because words are very sly. The rubbishy ones go into hiding and you have to dig them out. Repetitions, synonyms, things that simply don't mean anything. I go over every image, metaphor, comparison to see if they are fresh and accurate. If you can't find the right adjective for a noun, leave it alone. Let the noun stand by itself. A comparison must be as accurate as a slide rule and as natural as the smell of fennel. I take out all the participles and adverbs I can. Adverbs are lighter. They can even lend you wings in a way. But too many of them make the language spineless. A noun needs only one adjective, the choicest. Only a genius can afford two adjectives to one noun. Line is as important in prose as in an engraving. It has to be clear and hard. But the most important thing of all is not to kill the story by working on it, or else all of your labor has been in vain. It's like walking a tight rope.

Writing is work.