Grady Hendrix

When I read writers writing about writing, I usually get really confused. I feel like one of us must be doing it wrong, because their depiction of writing doesn’t seem to reflect the reality of what is probably the easiest job on the planet. So, just to keep myself sane, I thought I’d write down a few facts I have to keep reminding myself of about writing since I so often read the opposite.

Writing is not hard.
What part of writing is hard exactly? The part where I sit in a comfortable chair using my tiny fingertips to type in a climate-controlled room? The part where I can take breaks whenever I want? The part where I don’t have to commute to an office? Working construction is hard. Working retail is hard. Writing is not hard.

Writers are not brave.
When someone says a writer is brave I have no idea what they’re talking about. Unless they have actually served in combat, writers are not brave. Writing is not an act of courage. There is no heroism involved. Dredging up the worst and most humiliating secrets about yourself and displaying them in public involves several qualities — exhibitionism, a thick skin, self-awareness — but bravery is not amongst them. At all. (Exception: writers who face criminal prosecution are allowed to be called brave.)

Becoming a writer is not difficult.
You don’t need to take lessons, or go to workshops, or have a special writing space. You just need to write. That’s all. This is one of the few jobs that doesn’t require any training, a license, or a college degree. The barrier to entry is ridiculously low.

Writers don’t need to take a lot of breaks.
Writing is not a particularly strenuous physical activity unlike, say, building a dam. It is also not a particularly strenuous mental activity unlike, say, building a dam. You don’t even have to use math to write. So there’s no reason you should take a lot of breaks. You know how many breaks people with real jobs take during their 8-hour work days? Usually lunch and one 15 minute break every four hours. That’s about all writers need, too.

If writing is hard for you, there are plenty of other great careers.
Lots of people enjoy many different jobs. There are lawyers, doctors, firemen, graphic designers, masons, truck drivers. If you find writing difficult or have a hard time focusing, then it’s probably not for you. Instead of writing about how hard it is for you to write explore another career instead.

If you are procrastinating, that is a sign you should seek other employment.
If you do a lot of things to avoid writing then you should probably find another job. Most pilots love flying. A lot of doctors love medicine. Professional baseball players live for their games. Do you know what kind of people put off their work? People who hate their jobs. So if you’re avoiding writing, then it’s a good sign that maybe you want to be the world’s best Bioshock: Infinity player, or maybe you want to learn a lot of trivia you can tell people at a party, or maybe you want to keep up with the news. But what you don’t want to be is a writer.

From the February, 1968 issue of Man for Men magazine

Battered, bruised, drunk but unbroken, Mel Stomack rose once more in the middle of his well-appointed living room.

“Come on, you stinking ghosts,” he bellowed, waving his hairy fists. One of them knocked over some bric-a-brac. “Try that again, if you’re man enough.”

This time the ectoplasmic attack centered on his midsection, a series of phantasmal body blows hammering his breadbasket. The air whooshed out of him like a whoopee cushion sat on by a fat grandmother. He dropped to his knees on the conversation pit’s deep pile carpet.

“You ghosts think you can take Mel Stomack?” he gasped. “You think you can take me? I pay $82 a month for this pad and ain’t no stinking spook suckerpuncher gonna drive me out at those prices!”

He heaved himself up once more, blood flowing freely from his broken nose, his lacerated scalp, his busted jaw, his swollen neck, his ruptured spleen.

“Come on,” Mel Stomack screamed. “You hit like the ghost of a Market Street sissy.”

A decorative end table levitated into the air and hovered ominously over Mel’s skull. The Italian furrier turned his eyes on it the way one watches a rabid toy poodle, guarded but confrontational.

“Yeah?” Mel Stomack sneered. “Yeah? Is that all you got?”

The end table descended, powered by an unhuman force, but this time, Mel Stomack was ready…

From the January, 1971 issue of Man for Men magazine.

I stood knee-deep in the seething pork and screamed her name.

“Fo’landra!”

As far as I could see, it was nothing but pigs. The voice of the old timer rang in my ears. The voice we’d ignored!

Sometimes too many of ‘em jes’ gather on one side ‘a a hillside…sometimes these sorts ‘a things jes’ happen…lemme wash yer windshield fer a dallah…

“Fo’landra!”

But all I heard was the grunting…the grunting of ten thousand pigs!

From the November, 1961 issue of Man for Men magazine:

“Filthy! Filthy!” Eileen spat, trying to clear her mind of the insane perversion she had been forced to witness.

When they pulled the rough hood over her head and dragged her out of her cell she had little idea of what she was about to see. It was only after they yanked it off and revealed that she was in the May Day Stadium, the highest capacity seating stadium in the world, that the full horror of the situation red dawned on her, making her legs tremble and her breasts sway like a suspension bridge in a hurricane.

“No…” she muttered, through blue lips. “No…”

But no one was listening as she begged for mercy, her nubile form squirming in horror beneath the thin cotton shift she was forced to wear. The North Korean guards, dedicated Reds with an insatiable lust for Western women, wet their lips with their red, Communist tongues as they wallowed in her misery. And the mass games began.

100,000 comrades pulled cards from underneath their seats and, like synchronized swimmers from Hell itself, they held them up to form enormous mosaics of sexual depravity. The Glorious Leader Kim Jong-Un lifting his pot belly out of the way to expose his shrunken manhood to a duck. Kim Jong-Un sodomizing Angelina Jolie on the green marble desk in the UN General Assembly Hall while she was giving a report on human rights violations. Kim Jong-Un forcing counter-revolutionary circus clowns to kneel by a mass grave as he executed them with a submachine gun while a weeping Michelle Obama, wearing a duck costume, was forced to watch.

“Make it stop! Make it stop!” Eileen cried, whipping her head back and forth, her long, red tresses shimmering in the sunlight like Communist lightning bolts.

Sometime between the enormous image of Kim Jong-Un shopping naked at an Oklahoma Wal-Mart and Kim Jong-Un hanging his ass out a B-2 stealth bomber and defecating on a parade of Boy Scouts celebrating Veteran’s Day, Eileen passed out. When she woke up she was nothing more than a puddle of soft white flesh on the cold concrete floor of her cell.

“You think that filthy, huh?” Kim Jong-Un spat at her. He prodded her femininity with the toe of his boot. “Just you wait. My good friend Dennis Rodman is on the way here. Then we show you filthy!”

His sick laughter mingled with Eileen’s screams and the two sounds braided together into an unholy hangman’s rope of shame that reached up into the Heavens. But no one heard them. Because God turns his face in shame from Communist skies and He doesn’t listen to Red prayers.