Easy or hard?

A long time ago – over two decades ago – I studied creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London. One of my first-year tutors was the novelist, poet and jazz pianist Irving Weinman. I didn’t much like my other tutors, but I loved Irving. He died ten years ago – a sudden heart attack. His obituary described him as a tall, soft-spoken, genial American, and that’s how I remember him.

Irving wrote kind and thoughtful comments on my early drafts, which I still have in the loft. He told us stories about his days as a young writer in Boston, when he went to workshops with two young hopefuls called Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. And one night he revealed to us the ‘big secret’ of how to write.

‘You want to know how to do it?’ he asked. ‘I’ll show you.’ He rolled up his sleeves, picked up his pen, and started writing lines in his notebook. We all watched expectantly. He carried on for about ten minutes. Then he put his pen down and said, ‘There, that’s how you do it. It’s that easy.’

Some people in the workshop thought Irving was making fun of us. But I thought his practical demonstration of the secret to writing was fabulous.

Why not accept that writing is easy? You sit down and you do it. Is it any good? Could you make it better? Maybe, maybe not. Answering those questions might feel like hard work too. But as Irving also used to say, ‘it’s not like there’s any physical labour involved.’

Getting a first draft down, shaping it, finishing it, bringing it into the world – you can make that feel as hard as you like. You can make it feel so hard that you give up at the thought of it. Or you can make it feel easy. I don’t mean easy as in trivial or slapdash; you still have to put in the work. But it can be interesting, joyful, creative and easeful work. So, I roll up my sleeves.

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