quote from Samuel Johnson
~a column by Colleen O’Brien
A friend of mine just sent me her first book, published recently by a small press in Colorado. I am mightily impressed.
She’s been writing and rewriting for five years, turning out just about 360 words a day the first year, and then redoing it again and again for the editor who kept telling her to make it better.
Three-hundred sixty words is not much. It could be a long letter to a friend. It could be a page and a half-page report to your boss. It could be an entry in a diary.
Anybody could do it.
Well, not anybody. Only the body who has the will can do it. Less than 400 words a day is nothing, if you have the will.
If you don’t have the will, well, 40 words a day might as well be 40,000.
And of course the rewriting and polishing take up a lot of one’s time, adding to the idea that the birth of your book if it ever happens will be on a par with an elephant who has to be pregnant for nearly two years and one species of shark who gestates for three and a half.
And think of the big guys like Grisham and Steele who churn out a book a year. These writers are pure machine, apparently with giant wills and many stories tucked up their sleeves, waiting to fall out onto the keyboard.
It may be a good thing that all of us don’t pursue the writing of the book, whatever the low wisdom that states everyone has a book in ‘em. If everybody could do it, we’d be unable to get to town for the books stacked up in front yards, spilling onto the “roadway and on the pavement gray.”
I would like to be my friend. Or be me with the will of my friend. I always thought I’d write a book, and really, I’ve tried. I have three unfinished under my desk and one in a drawer that bores me so I haven’t had the will to look at it for 15 years. If I can’t stay awake reading it, my chances for publication aren’t good.
I study the new books in whatever public library I enter, overwhelmed by the number of them. And even though with many of them I can’t get past the first page, they have been published. Somebody thought they were worth it, if not me. Snoopy’s editor was probably not in on the choosing, either, for he was a tough nut to get around. To Snoopy he wrote, “Thank you for not sending us anything.”
Even the Bible gets a few words in on book writing: Ecclesiastes 12:12 “Of making many books there is no end….” I don’t know if the writer was praising or damning the making of books, but even as pundits sing woe to the lack of book readers today, there are plenty of books being published each month all over the world. Somebody’s reading.
Many more folks try to write books than get it done. So, to me, any book published, however bad, at least has a strong will and a persistent work ethic behind it, more than I can say for myself.
Some of us are born to write the book, some to read it. Much less hard work in the reading – our job is to turn the page — and also little agony in the reading– that too is all on the page.
“Read on” is my advice to myself. The will to write a whole book is not mine.
Yet.
