Thursday, May 04, 2006

I hope you didn't come here just to hear me bitch...

Because Garrison Keillor thinks I should suck it up, and he says it better than I could:

"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?" (you have to watch a free ad on Salon.com if you're not a premium member, but it's worth it...)

Keillor didn't mention the unpublished writers who spend more time bitching than actually submitting their work to editors and agents, but I guess that goes without saying. Honestly, writing isn't that hard. Revision is. Working with editors is. Getting rejected is. Being persistent is. Motivating yourself is. But the writing? Piece of cake.

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