To Quit or Not to Quit (Writing)?

A young writer presented his first work to Philip Roth and this was how the conversation went:

“he (Roth) told the guy to quit writing. Here’s the exact quote: “I would quit while you’re ahead. Really. It’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and you write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.”

Elizabeth Gilbert argued against Roth’s advice:

“Now, listen. While it is certainly not historically unheard of for famous authors to complain about their torturous lives (Balzac: “I am a galley slave to pen and ink”; Styron: “Let’s face it. Writing is hell”; Mailer: “Every one of my books killed me a little more”) this statement — by one of America’s most lauded living novelists — struck me as particularly cranky.

Because, seriously — is writing really all that difficult? Yes, of course, it is; I know this personally — but is it that much more difficult than other things? Is it more difficult than working in a steel mill, or raising a child alone, or commuting three hours a day to a deeply unsatisfying cubicle job, or doing laundry in a nursing home, or running a hospital ward, or being a luggage handler, or digging septic systems, or waiting tables at a delicatessen, or — for that matter — pretty much anything else that people do?”

While I don’t agree with Roth, I don’t think Gilbert’s arguments are good ones against it either. Plenty of jobs (like the steel mill job) are repetitive and boring: but after a certain amount of practice, you could do it without thinking. Some of the other jobs on her list are tough because no two days are the same and one has to constantly improvise.

But here’s the critical difference about the profession of writing: in all the others, you are a part of a larger system, so you get a second chance (and even a third chance) when you fail. An author, though, may never get that chance. Plus, he cannot write the same kind of stuff again and again (well ok, there are successful authors like Sidney Sheldon who do just that, but they are the exception): so the writer needs to be creative. And creativity is very hard: and few regular jobs demand creativity at the frequency that an author’s demands it. Remember, not even Steve Jobs had to be creative that often!

So yes, methinks writing is tougher than most other jobs. But that still doesn’t make Roth’s advice right.