"I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer"
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Lessing’s sentence has the blunt, unsentimental authority of someone who’s watched the romance of “the writing life” calcify into an industry. She aims the line not at beginners, exactly, but at the institutions that sell them a story: that talent will be “nurtured,” that community will soften the edges, that craft is a set of learnable moves. Lessing doesn’t deny craft; she attacks the packaging. If a program can’t admit the uglier economics of attention, time, and solitude, it isn’t merely incomplete - it’s dishonest.
The structure matters. She counts off “one” and “two” like a checklist a school might print on a brochure, then uses that bureaucratic cadence to puncture bureaucracy. “Hard work” is the socially acceptable part, the Protestant ethic everyone can applaud. The sharper knife is in the second clause: you have to give up “a great deal of life.” Lessing makes sacrifice sound like a practical requirement, not an aesthetic choice. The subtext is that writing isn’t just something you do; it reorganizes your relationships, your availability, your capacity to be easygoing at dinner.
Context deepens the severity. Lessing’s career was built alongside political disillusionment, single motherhood, financial strain, and a lifelong refusal to play nicely with literary pieties. She’s speaking from a 20th-century vantage point where “writer” isn’t a brand; it’s a vocation with costs that don’t photograph well. Read now, in an era when programs promise networks and platforms, her warning lands as both admonition and dare: if you want the work, be honest about what it will take from you.
The structure matters. She counts off “one” and “two” like a checklist a school might print on a brochure, then uses that bureaucratic cadence to puncture bureaucracy. “Hard work” is the socially acceptable part, the Protestant ethic everyone can applaud. The sharper knife is in the second clause: you have to give up “a great deal of life.” Lessing makes sacrifice sound like a practical requirement, not an aesthetic choice. The subtext is that writing isn’t just something you do; it reorganizes your relationships, your availability, your capacity to be easygoing at dinner.
Context deepens the severity. Lessing’s career was built alongside political disillusionment, single motherhood, financial strain, and a lifelong refusal to play nicely with literary pieties. She’s speaking from a 20th-century vantage point where “writer” isn’t a brand; it’s a vocation with costs that don’t photograph well. Read now, in an era when programs promise networks and platforms, her warning lands as both admonition and dare: if you want the work, be honest about what it will take from you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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