Lazy

This is my Facebook status right now, and I have a visceral need to post it here:

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

George Orwell

Writers are not lazy. They’re not lazy a day in their lives. This quote made me FURIOUS and I have to tell you why. It makes me crazy that people think I am indolent and unmotivated at times, when that is so far from reality that bass ackwards doesn’t even begin to cover it. Writers are the people that do all the serious emotional work of finding the human condition and describing it. It’s backbreaking work. Just tears and frustration all over the place at times, and euphoric at others. Carrying that inside yourself is a burden. Don’t kid yourself. The tapes of things I need to write down are enormous and run through my head all day long. Just because you cannot see work happening does not mean it is not there. It is cerebral and cellular. If you are a writer and you constantly hear the message that you’re lazy and you believe it, cut that shit out right now. You do the work that most people don’t have the chutzpah to sit in for five minutes, much less the entirety of your life. Selfish and vain are adjectives on which I do not have the right to comment.

 

I am REALLY going to have to let Argo know how much mileage I’ve gotten out of judgmental dickhead. It’s like someone validated that I am every bit the jackass I’ve always known I had the capacity to be, and it’s good to have a skill.