Life & Wisdom Quote by Jeffery Deaver

Deaver is smuggling a craftsman’s credo into a seemingly casual confession: writing, even when it’s “poetry,” isn’t a mystical download. It’s engineered pleasure. The first clause is tactile and almost domestic - “the way words go together” treats language like joinery, not revelation. Then he pivots to “gamesmanship,” a term that yanks art toward sport: strategy, rules, feints, the satisfaction of outsmarting a problem. Coming from a writer best known for propulsive crime fiction, the word choice is telling. He’s framing lyric writing not as a departure from genre work but as its concentrated form: tighter constraints, higher stakes per syllable, less room to hide behind plot velocity.

The subtext is anti-romantic in the best way. Deaver quietly rejects the idea that “real” writers are those who suffer beautifully. His pleasure is competitive and technical, the pleasure of making a system sing. “Gamesmanship” also suggests an audience - someone to impress, surprise, maybe even trap. That’s the thriller writer’s instinct bleeding into the poet’s workshop: the reader is a participant, and the poem is a designed experience.

“It is such a challenge” lands like a simple tag, but it’s the key. He’s defending difficulty as a feature, not a barrier. In a culture that often treats effort as evidence you’re doing it wrong, Deaver is arguing the opposite: the resistance is the point, and the joy is in meeting it.