May 26, 2009
People do it on the couch. They do it on the beach. They do it on airplanes and trains…
It’s a fact. People love to read. They do. They love to curl up on the couch under a warm blanket with a hot cup of tea. They like to lay out with the sun blistering their backs while they turn page after page. People love to read so much that there are whole genres titled simply by the places people like to read: “a good beach book” or a “rainy day book”… People create entire clubs around the books they read to discuss the words and lines they like the most!
So I ask you. If people love to read so much, why don’t they treat those of us in the midst of providing them such pleasure with a bit of respect? Why do we have to prove ourselves? Why is it not a worthwhile endeavor in the world’s eyes until we are published and making money for some big firm?
Don’t people realize that we writers AGONIZE over sentence structure and plot lines…we AGONIZE over which word choice will give you, the reader, the maximum emotion or understanding… And what do we get for this exhausting and time consuming AGONY? Nada. We get our toil and work called a “hobby” or “long-shot”.
Well, if every would-be-writer gave up so easily and didn’t follow their passion and aim for that “long shot” success, then we’d all be missing out on the the great heirlooms of literature like Gone With The Wind and Of Mice and Men…we’d have missed out on the sleeper successes of The Kite Runner and Memoirs of a Geisha…
So for every reader out there who looks at the aspiring writer and wonders why they are wasting their time or calls their life’s work a “hobby”, next time just think where you might be if all the would-be-writers in the world instead went out and became engineers and pediatricians.