"Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult"
About this Quote
Leacock’s gag lands because it flips the usual martyr mythology of writing. Most writers love to dramatize the “jotting” part as agony; he treats it like clerical work. The real bottleneck, he insists, is upstream: the stubborn fact that ideas don’t show up on demand. It’s a joke with an economist’s instincts about scarcity and production. You can have the factory (paper, pen, discipline) humming, but if the raw material (an original thought) doesn’t arrive, output collapses.
The intent is to puncture both vanity and self-pity. By calling writing “no trouble,” Leacock mocks anyone who wants credit for merely typing. He also needles the well-meaning advice culture that reduces creativity to process: set a routine, draft daily, break it into steps. Sure. But the step that actually matters is the one no one can reliably schedule: the moment of genuine occurrence. That’s where insecurity hides, because it’s where the work can’t be faked.
There’s subtext, too, about modern professionalism. Leacock lived in an era when print culture was booming and “content” (essays, lectures, columns) was becoming a job. His line reads like a preemptive strike against productivity metrics: you can measure pages, hours, word counts. You can’t audit insight. By framing inspiration as the difficult part, he quietly defends the invisible labor of thinking, noticing, and waiting, while also refusing to romanticize it. The wit is dry: the hardest part of writing is the part you can’t pretend to do.
The intent is to puncture both vanity and self-pity. By calling writing “no trouble,” Leacock mocks anyone who wants credit for merely typing. He also needles the well-meaning advice culture that reduces creativity to process: set a routine, draft daily, break it into steps. Sure. But the step that actually matters is the one no one can reliably schedule: the moment of genuine occurrence. That’s where insecurity hides, because it’s where the work can’t be faked.
There’s subtext, too, about modern professionalism. Leacock lived in an era when print culture was booming and “content” (essays, lectures, columns) was becoming a job. His line reads like a preemptive strike against productivity metrics: you can measure pages, hours, word counts. You can’t audit insight. By framing inspiration as the difficult part, he quietly defends the invisible labor of thinking, noticing, and waiting, while also refusing to romanticize it. The wit is dry: the hardest part of writing is the part you can’t pretend to do.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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