Life & Wisdom Quote by Tracy Kidder

Kidder’s line is a polite slap at the cult of “effortless” prose. It flips the romantic fantasy of the writer as a naturally gifted channel and replaces it with a craft ethic: if it felt easy to make, it will feel easy to dismiss. The sting is in “it shows” - the suggestion that readers can sense shortcuts even when they can’t name them. Smoothness, in this view, is often the byproduct of avoiding the hard parts: the awkward fact that doesn’t fit, the sentence that needs rebuilding, the argument that won’t behave.

The subtext is almost moral. Kidder isn’t just praising struggle; he’s warning against complacency masquerading as clarity. Writing that “comes too easily” can drift into generic cadence, borrowed insights, and pre-chewed metaphors - prose that performs “writerly” without doing the real work of seeing. If the writer didn’t have to wrestle with meaning, why should the reader bother to wrestle with attention?

Context matters: Kidder is a reporter’s reporter, known for narrative nonfiction that depends on accuracy and architecture. In that world, ease is suspect because every clean paragraph sits atop messy notebooks, contradictory interviews, and scenes that only cohere after brutal selection. His point isn’t that good writing must sound labored; it’s that it usually becomes readable only after it has been made hard for the writer. The friction happens backstage, so the reader can move through the page without getting snagged on the author’s laziness.