Writing is
tough. In fact, I don’t know of any activity that is more
difficult than writing. I know this is not so for every writer. There
are some gifted individuals, as disparate as Joyce Carol Oates on the
one hand, and Nora Roberts on the other, who write seemingly without
effort, turning out vast numbers of books and, even more
impressively, vast numbers of pages a day.
Nora
Roberts is famous for publishing, on a quite routine basis, some ten
novels a year. She is loved by her readers, and despised by the
critics. Joyce Carol Oates, loved by both critics and readers, in her
prime wrote forty five pages a day.
These are
the outliers. Speaking for myself, and for many writers, both
published and unpublished, I know that the process of developing
story that is both rich and inevitable is just about as exhausting as
anything can be.
And yet, we
persist, because the personal rewards are so great – and the lure
of professional, not to say, financial, success, as distant as it may
sometimes seem, so enticing.
I’d like
to dwell on one particular personal reward for a moment.
A curious
phenomenon has been playing itself out in the US for some years now,
which a couple of observers have started drawing attention to. On the
one hand, talk therapy has been in decline for a decade or two.
Woody Allen might, famously, have consulted a therapist five times a
week for decades – but people like him are in a shrinking minority.
At the same
time, writing schools, both academic and non-academic, writing
retreats, short writing courses and online writing programmes have
flourished as never before.
Everyone
and her mother is writing a memoir, or thinking of writing a novel,
or secretly has
written not just a novel, but a trilogy!
Surely
there’s a connection somewhere here? Less talk therapy, more
writing. It’s merely a correlation at present, but I’m waiting
for the research that shows a causal connection.
Because
writing fiction is
therapy, even if what we write is the airiest possible piece of
romantic froth. To write it demands that we plumb our own experience,
and our own feelings and, yes, even our own traumas. Romance in life
is never
trivial, although romance in fiction is so easily – and so wrongly
– dismissed as meaningless nonsense.
Of course,
that’s why writing’s difficult: because we have to drill deep to
the emotions that drive the fiction. And that process of finding
within ourselves the wellsprings of both joy and despair will always
leave us wrung out.
Which
doesn’t answer the conundrum posed by people like Roberts and Oates
– but it does explain, to my satisfaction, why a morning’s
brainstorm leaves me beached and panting for the rest of the day.
About the Author
Richard
Beynon is an award-winning film and television scriptwriter with a
long and accomplished career in the industry. He, together with
novelist Jo-Anne Richards, run Allaboutwriting
which teaches creative writing face to face in Johannesburg and Cape
Town, as well as online – and mentors writers through the process
of writing fiction, non-fiction and screenplays. Richard is currently
cruising the canals of England, on his narrowboat Patience. Read
about it here.
