"When I say "work" I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs"
About this Quote
Margaret Laurence draws a bright, almost ruthless border around the one activity she’s unwilling to bargain down: writing. The line lands with the bluntness of someone who has learned, probably the hard way, that a woman’s time is endlessly up for grabs unless she names it and defends it. By putting work in scare quotes, she exposes how slippery the word is - how easily “work” gets diluted into errands, favors, admin, emotional caretaking, “just for now” commitments. Her insistence that everything else is “odd jobs” isn’t contempt for labor; it’s a demotion of distractions.
The subtext is a quiet refusal of the productivity theater that surrounds creative life. Writers are expected to justify themselves with teaching, lecturing, committee service, social duties - respectable scaffolding that makes the actual writing seem like a hobby performed in spare time. Laurence flips that script. Writing isn’t the indulgence; it’s the vocation. The rest is what you do to subsidize it, protect it, or postpone it.
Context matters: a Canadian novelist building a serious career in a culture that has often treated its artists as underfunded national accessories, and in a century when women’s “real work” was routinely defined as everything but their own ambition. The sentence works because it’s both pragmatic and defiant: it admits the grind of earning a life while insisting that the only labor that counts, the one with consequences for her identity, is the page.
The subtext is a quiet refusal of the productivity theater that surrounds creative life. Writers are expected to justify themselves with teaching, lecturing, committee service, social duties - respectable scaffolding that makes the actual writing seem like a hobby performed in spare time. Laurence flips that script. Writing isn’t the indulgence; it’s the vocation. The rest is what you do to subsidize it, protect it, or postpone it.
Context matters: a Canadian novelist building a serious career in a culture that has often treated its artists as underfunded national accessories, and in a century when women’s “real work” was routinely defined as everything but their own ambition. The sentence works because it’s both pragmatic and defiant: it admits the grind of earning a life while insisting that the only labor that counts, the one with consequences for her identity, is the page.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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