Phoebe Kate

“All good things come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.”

—Norman Maclean (1902-1990, author of A River Runs Through It)

A few years back, I read an interview with much-lionized writer Thom Jones, a frequent fiction contributer to The New Yorker in the 1990s. When asked how long a particular story took him to write and how much he revised it, he replied that he wrote it in an afternoon and no revision was needed because he was at the top of his craft.

Well!  Mr. Jones certainly can’t be accused of being too modest, can he?

I don’t deny the benefits of being a seasoned craftsman.  After a few years of practice, one becomes adept at manipulating language, which admittedly makes the writing process faster and easier.  Our first drafts read pretty damn good and may get published.  We feel like good writers and in a certain sense, we are — just as a carpenter who’s learned to handle his tools well can quickly saw boards evenly and nail them together straight to make a chair or table.  Is it a work of art, though?       

Proficiency with words, however, has very little to do with the creative process, which leads us to write stories that are fully realized and truly unique.  It takes time and patience and thought, and then more time and more patience and a lot of re-thinking and rewriting to explore all the possibilities in our themes and our characters’ psyches. 

It’s hard work, because we’re just beginning to get acquainted with the people we’ve created and the situations they’re in.   It’s a 24/7 job because the right side of our brain can’t be turned off like a computer at the end of the day.  It’s demanding because we can’t write “The End” on the last page (whether it be a 100-word flash fiction or a 500,000-word epic) until we’re damn good and sure it really is — that we’ve gone as far as we can go with our ideas and expressed them in a way nobody else has done before or done better.  

Ursula Le Guin wrote, “It is good to have an end to journey toward.  But it is the journey that matters, in the end.”  It’s awesome to get first drafts published in A-list magazines, but I wonder if authors like Mr. Jones, in truncating the creative process, are missing out on all the real fun of being a writer.

–phoebe kate