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A mother of one of my daughter's classmates announced on Facebook yesterday that she was starting a college course in creative writing and is going to write novels for a living. _ she ended her post by saying 'I read loads of books - some of which are rubbish so how hard can it be?'
I smiled and will say nothing - but who knows she may write a best seller straight off....
Comments
It's probably hard work writing a novel which turns out to be bad in some people's opinion. It's one of those things that if it were easy then lots of people would turn their hand to novel writing.
I take your point, CuppaJoe, but in my defence there is more to this than immediately meets the eye. Speaking for myself, I was not pouring scorn on someone's naivety (at least not intentionally).
I have spent the last twenty years learning my craft. It takes time, diligence and sheer hard work to become a proficient writer. My reaction was based on years of frustration with people thinking that what I do is easy-peasy and takes no skill. (Whoever says that of musicians, for example?) It's ignorant and hurtful to be dismissed by someone who has no writing experience and says 'how hard can it be?' because to be a good writer takes a great deal of hard work as you yourself acknowledged.
Call me over-sensitive if you will.
If she is doing a creative writing course at college I she must have done some writing already, otherwise surely she wouldn't have been accepted? Unless it's just a course by an outside tutor and done for instance in the evening when they will accept anyone. If the latter, she'll soon learn. If the former, maybe she is a genius and one of those for whole perfect prose flows. Pretty unlikely though.
Having said that I went to one of the latter courses and had my stuff sent off by the tutor and accepted. And Usborne sent a letter back telling me they loved my manuscript (which was a story), it wasn't right for their list, but giving me the list of two other editors at other publishers, they had 'alerted'. I didn't realise this was such a good thing and didn't send it off again. I had two young children and got busy. I was too was naive! I didn't really believe you could just go to one writing course and get published. Naive the other way! i was published in anthologies form then on. It took a further ten years to get my own book.
Colleague: Oh, I think I could write a book.
Self: Well, why don't you?
Colleague: I haven't got the time.
Self: What do you do in the evenings?
Colleague: Watch the telly.
Self: Try giving up two hours of that - more at weekends - and you'll eventually get through it. (This is what I did when I first started writing seriously.)
This was greeted with silence and a crestfallen look. Was this because she was surprised to find that work was actually involved? Or was it her way of saying "You're not so clever because I could do it too. Piece of cake."
I think probably a lot of people have a daydream of writing a book and seeing their name on the cover. Perhaps they could but they never will. Youthful naivete is something else. It will receive a rude awakening.