Friday 29 April 2011

This writing life, by Richard Ford

'I write novels and stories and essays for a living. But is it work?'

I've always had uneasy loyalties about the relevance of the term "work" to the activities I perform every day, and which occupy the hours when most other people are in fact "working". I write novels and stories and essays for a living. And while I fairly mindlessly refer to what I do as "work" ("I'm working, I can't help you shovel the driveway;" "I start work every day at eight and work on 'til cocktail hour;" "I've been working way too hard, I need a trip to Belize"), it's hard for me to think that work is what I really do.

Work, after all ? to me, anyway ? signifies something hard. And while writing novels can be (I love this word) challenging (it can also be tedious in the extreme; take forever to finish; demoralise me into granite and make me want to quit and find another line of work), it's not ever what I'd call hard. A hard job, okay, would have to be strenuous and pressurised (writing's almost never that way). It would have to be obdurate, never offering me a chance to let up (I can quit writing any time I want to and come back tomorrow, or never). And it would have to be skimpy on personal-spiritual rewards (I'm always trying to do what Chekhov did . . . change the way some reader sees the world; so big rewards are always out there). In my view, being a first-year law student at Harvard would not be hard; but being a non-partnered associate at Skadden, Arps would be. Learning to play "The Flight of the Bumble Bee" on a Sousaphone would not be hard; but working on the dashboard assembly team for the Ford-150 would most certainly be. You see what I mean. Hard is staring into one of those mind-corroding x-ray machines at LaGuardia. Or taking tolls on the Jersey Turnpike.

A cavalier part of me would like to say that I endured the experience of hard work when I was young and quickly went searching for something better, possibly easier to do, and accidentally hit on writing. I'm not sure that's altogether true, of course. I'm not sure, for instance, I ever had a hard job. I worked on the Missouri Pacific Railroad as a switchman when I was 17. I cleared land for the Neighborhood Youth Corps in Arkansas when I was 21. I was a house detective and carried a pistol. I was a science editor for American Druggist Magazine. I even attended law school. But I can't say any of that was really hard. And writing's really no harder. Plus it's a lot more interesting.

Indeed, a smug, self-aggrandising part of me doesn't really understand how anybody who's not a writer gets along in life. Not only is writing easier than almost any occupation I know; but you also run your own operation; you have at least a chance to admire what you do and feel a kinship with the greats; you get to make excellent use (by sticking it in your work) of the constant flood of life's jetsam ? the daily freshet that drives most people crazy; and you have a chance to please total strangers with your efforts, and at least potentially, marginally make the world a better place. Plus, if you fail at all of that, nobody gives a fig ? but you ? and you soon get over it. True, you usually don't make a lot of money, which is a drag. But I associate making a lot of money with jobs that are so tedious (and hard) that only big money would make you do it. My little job I'd do for free ? and often have.

Why I routinely refer to what I do as "work" probably just reveals an old anxiety in me ? the uneasy loyalty I already mentioned (although these days I don't consider it very important). On the one hand, I usually refer to writing as work because I don't know what else to call it. "Work" just seems easier. As cavalier as I am, it'd be cumbersome always to be referring to what I do as "my oeuvre", or "my on-going inner confession", or even just "my art". In that way, "work" is my shorthand. Years ago, I was briefly a teacher of creative writing at the University of Michigan, and I had a young woman in my class who complained, sometimes caustically, about me always referring to writing as work. "Why do you have to call it work?" she'd say, scowling at me dismissively. "It's oppressive. It's demeaning and middlebrow. It's just wrong." This was 1973. My young writers were trying hard to affiliate their fledgling efforts with some kind of rare- fied, Pateresque art-for-art's-sake gestalt. I was getting in their way with my proletarian vocabulary. They wanted me to stop it. I quit teaching, instead.

But I think the truth was ? back then, when I was a young writer, myself, and maybe still is, now that I'm getting to be an old one ? my working-class origins were making their claim on me. Everybody worked in my family ? from the day they could fit a shoulder to the wheel to the day they virtually fell under it. My mother ran the cigar stand in the lobby of the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs when she was 15 years old (her stepfather, who managed the place, saw to it). My father worked from his mid-teens, throughout the depression, and kept one job right through the world war and the 50s, to the day he died, whereupon my widowed mother went to work as a night auditor in yet another hotel. Not that this was unusual. Everybody we knew worked. My family initially recognised everyone we knew by the jobs these people held down. A job meant who you were, it gave early indication of what you were worth, it suggested something about your character as a provider and what you valued, about your hold on a secure future, about your grasp on moral responsibility and self-awareness. It was an easy index (probably too easy) for what the world needed to know about you. But if you didn't have work, well, the world would find another index ? which it sometimes did at your peril. "He doesn't have a job" meant something specific to us, and it didn't mean you were rich.

Me calling the writing tasks I undertake "work" is just, I'm sure, my effort to have it both ways ? the way we writers always prefer it: to have it easy; but also to pawn myself off as a credible working stiff, a wage earner, a guy who has coming to him whatever real work might entitle him to ? that modicum of respect, of self-esteem, of legitimacy in a culture where writers don't really have a comfortable, secure place other than the bestseller list, or some college campus, venues where I haven't spent much time so far. "Work" is my little assertion that when I do it, I mean it, and would like you to take it and me seriously. Just like a guy who works on the line at Ford, or who delivers babies, or who teaches in the inner city and comes home exhausted. Somebody who gives an honest day's work for an honest day's pay ? even if in my case that's not always what I do.


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/29/writing-life-richard-ford-author

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