Garrison Keillor is tired of writers who whine about how hard it is to write:
It’s the
purest form of arrogance: Lest you don’t notice what a brilliant artist I am,
let me tell you how I agonize over my work. To which I say: Get a job. Try
teaching eighth-grade English, five classes a day, 35 kids in a class, from
September to June, and then tell us about suffering.The fact
of the matter is that the people who struggle most with writing are drunks.
They get hammered at night and in the morning their heads are full of pain and
adverbs. Writing is hard for them, but so would golf be, or planting alfalfa,
or assembling parts in a factory.The
biggest whiners are the writers who get prizes and fellowships for writing
stuff that’s painful to read, and so they accumulate long résumés
and few readers and wind up teaching in universities where they inflict their
gloomy pretensions on the young. Writers who write for a living don’t complain
about the difficulty of it. It does nothing for the reader to know you went
through 14 drafts of a book, so why mention it?
