Writing Is A Job

 I know Anthony Trollope got a bad rep for saying he wrote so many words a day (10,000?).

There was a while last year I kept track of the words done each, and gave it up as too much work. It was nowhere close to 10,000

(I went to double-check the number of words and found some interesting links: To celebrate Anthony Trollope’s 200th anniversary, writers choose their favourite novel, Anthony Trollope's literary reputation : its development and validity, A novelist who hunted the fox: Anthony Trollope today (wherein I found again the story and the number of words was 2,500 - still didn't hit that, either):

James later responded more warmly to Trollope’s achievement, placing him below Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, to be sure, yet insisting that “he belonged to the same family” as that great triumvirate of Victorian writers. What had changed was not so much James’s judgment about the character of Trollope’s work—Trollope must ever lack Jamesian “seriousness”—but his recognition that work of such character was nothing to be ashamed of. “His great, his inestimable merit,” James wrote in an appreciative retrospective essay published shortly after Trollope’s death in 1882, “was a complete appreciation of the usual.”

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Then there was Trollope’s attitude toward money. Like most authors, he liked it. Unlike many, he frankly admitted that he wrote for it. Moreover, he kept as meticulous tabs on his earnings as he did on his writing, reproducing at the end of the Autobiography the sums he received for each of his books through 1879. The total was £68,939 17s. 5d., a result that Trollope described as “comfortable” but not “splendid.” (According to Professor Hall, the total at the time of his death three years later was some £10,000 more.) He comments caustically that “authors are told that they should disregard payment for their work, and be content to devote their unbought brains to the welfare of the public. Brains that are unbought will never serve the public much. Take away from English authors their copyrights, and you would very soon take away also from England her authors.”

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And what, finally, was Trollope’s “moral purpose”? It is of course hard to say. Trollope is not a writer from whom one can easily extract formulas. But in her unjustly neglected essay “Trollope For Grown-Ups” (1962), the critic Clara Claiborne Park comes close to the heart of the matter when she describes the novelist as “the laureate of compromise.” Trollope is almost alone, she notes, in telling us “what we need to hear: be reasonable, be moderate, in action, in desire, in expectation, and you will be fairly happy.” This may seem like small beer. But it can be powerful compensation for what Professor Park calls “the desolation caused by naked principle among people.” If Trollope lacked a doctrine to impose as virtue, he came armed with an abundance of experience and psychological insight. As his narrator puts it in Barchester Towers, “Till we can become divine we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for a change we sink to something lower.” 

(I think those quotes might explain why I like him  - he is rather frank); and David Lodge: rereading Anthony Trollope (Lodge is another favorite of mine). That said, I spent too much time on this aside, but do give Trollope a spin. I agree with the estimation of James from above; I would add, however, that he can be less troubling than reading The Big Three. As Gogol is easier to read than Tolstoy.)

However much one might want to think of themselsves as artisits, the art is work. It was the following from The State of the Crime Novel, Part 1: Writing Life that prompted this post:

Susan Isaacs (nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – Bad, Bad Seymour Brown): Writing may be an art. It is certainly a craft. But also it’s a job. You have to put in regular hours and go to work whether you feel like it or not. You already may be working one job and even have another as parent or caregiver, so how can you possibly do it? By figuring out a schedule that’s doable, albeit hard. Three nights a week for three hours, or even two. Every Saturday or Sunday. Whatever. Yes, it will take longer, but it will get done if you stick to your schedule. You have to work and not get sidetracked reading How to Write Fiction That’s Fabulous and Will Make You Megabucks during your writing hours. That time is for writing your own book.

 For those worried about being hacks, consider this from The Paris Review's interview of Iris Murdoch:

INTERVIEWER

What are your daily work habits? 

MURDOCH

I like working and when I have time to work, I work. But I also have to do other things like washing up and buying food. Fortunately my husband does the cooking. I sometimes have to go to London or I want to see my friends. Otherwise, I work pretty steadily all the time. I go to bed early and I start work very early. I work all morning, and then I shop and write letters—the letters take up a lot of time—in the afternoon. Then I work again from about half-past four until seven or eight. So I work steadily when I’ve got the open time, which is more days than not.

INTERVIEWER

How many words a day do you usually write?

MURDOCH

I’ve never thought of counting words. I’d rather not know.

That is called working.

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