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About Writing from an author I love
Aug. 9th, 2007 11:11 amAn exercept from Michael Thomas Ford that explains me better than I ever could when it comes to writing.
[Note: I realize it probably says something about the astounding level of my laziness that I would sit here and type up someone else's words rather than think up my own.]
"Writers who claim they've wanted to write since the age of six and would die if they couldn't write are pathological liars.
I hate writing. In fact, I will do almost anything to avoid doing it, and actually getting me to produce something is no less a miracle than it must have been to construct the hanging gardens of Babylon. If it wasn't for the simple fact that I am totally unemployable in any other capacity, I probably wouldn't write at all. And if someone were to offer me a vast sum of cash to stop, I would. Why Joe Eszterhas, the screenwriter of such classics as Showgirls and Basic Instinct, and the highest-paid writer in Hollywood, refuses to make the same concession, I cannot understand. He's probably written since he was six.
Discovering this about me amazes people who know that I have made a living as a writer for several years now. This is because people have intersting ideas about writers. most think we spring from our beds each morning and leap to the keyboard to get down all the fresh ideas that have been birthed in the subconscious while we sleep. They envision us spending joyous days at the computer creating marvelous new worlds and turning out witty phrases left and right until, breathless from the acto fo creation and weak from forgetting to eat, we repair to the kitchen for a light snack of leftover sushi before settling down to watch something stimulating on PBS.
I do know writers like that, but they are not to be trusted, and I do not speak to them. My own life, and that of must full-time writers I know, is far less glamorous. How books are written remains a mystery I do not fully understand, even though I have produced close to two dozen of them. I know only that, in my case, they generally are pieced together in fits of activity that come between extended periods of not doing anything at all."
[Note: I realize it probably says something about the astounding level of my laziness that I would sit here and type up someone else's words rather than think up my own.]
"Writers who claim they've wanted to write since the age of six and would die if they couldn't write are pathological liars.
I hate writing. In fact, I will do almost anything to avoid doing it, and actually getting me to produce something is no less a miracle than it must have been to construct the hanging gardens of Babylon. If it wasn't for the simple fact that I am totally unemployable in any other capacity, I probably wouldn't write at all. And if someone were to offer me a vast sum of cash to stop, I would. Why Joe Eszterhas, the screenwriter of such classics as Showgirls and Basic Instinct, and the highest-paid writer in Hollywood, refuses to make the same concession, I cannot understand. He's probably written since he was six.
Discovering this about me amazes people who know that I have made a living as a writer for several years now. This is because people have intersting ideas about writers. most think we spring from our beds each morning and leap to the keyboard to get down all the fresh ideas that have been birthed in the subconscious while we sleep. They envision us spending joyous days at the computer creating marvelous new worlds and turning out witty phrases left and right until, breathless from the acto fo creation and weak from forgetting to eat, we repair to the kitchen for a light snack of leftover sushi before settling down to watch something stimulating on PBS.
I do know writers like that, but they are not to be trusted, and I do not speak to them. My own life, and that of must full-time writers I know, is far less glamorous. How books are written remains a mystery I do not fully understand, even though I have produced close to two dozen of them. I know only that, in my case, they generally are pieced together in fits of activity that come between extended periods of not doing anything at all."
