Life & Wisdom Quote by Fred Saberhagen

Ideas, Saberhagen shrugs, are cheap the way oxygen is cheap: abundant, necessary, and not remotely the point. The point is the grimly unglamorous part people like to skip when they romanticize writing - the “paperwork.” That word is the knife twist. It frames storytelling not as inspiration lightning but as administrative grind: the sitting down, the drafting, the agonizing over “just the right words,” the slow conversion of a hazy notion into something another mind can actually inhabit.

The intent is corrective and demystifying. Saberhagen isn’t insulting imagination; he’s relocating creative prestige from brainstorming to execution. Anyone can have a premise in the shower. Fewer people will wrestle that premise through structure, voice, pacing, causality - all the invisible choices that make a “coherent story” feel inevitable rather than improvised. His aside “that is” functions like a writerly footnote, clarifying that the labor isn’t thinking in the abstract but thinking in sequence, under constraint, with language as the final test.

There’s subtext here about professionalism. Calling it “paperwork” smuggles in a work ethic: show up, do the job, revise the job. It also carries the weary humor of a working genre writer - someone who has lived through deadlines and knows that artistry often looks like clerical persistence from the inside. In context, it’s a small manifesto against the cult of the idea, insisting the real separator isn’t originality but endurance at the desk.