Quote of the Day: Writing is hard

Herb Caen, not actually quoted here

We’re going to shake things up on the Quote of the Day by offering a two-fer. This is the second day, after all. I don’t want it to get stale.

The first comes from a longtime newspaper and magazine writer and editor, college writing teacher and author of books on writing:

If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do.

—William Zinsser

The second quote is another way of saying the same thing. It’s often attributed to Nathaniel Hawthorne, but others get credit for it also.*

Easy reading is damned hard writing.

I got my first real insight into this point, that it takes a lot of effort and craft to make your writing seem easy and effortless, when I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and began reading the legendary newspaper columnist Herb Caen.

I didn’t think much of him at first. He was the last great practitioner of a mid-century form known as “three-dot journalism.” His column, modeled on the work of his hero, Walter Winchell, was casual, gossipy, full of slang, sentence fragments, running gags, blind items and inside jokes.

It was a quick, fun read, but I thought he was a hack, typing away without much style.

After a while, though, I noticed that his Saturday column—he wrote six days a week, and he probably would have written seven but the San Francisco Chronicle had no Sunday edition in those days—was different. It wasn’t a collection of “items.” It was a narrative piece.

And my gosh, it was a thing of beauty! It was lyrical, stylish, often poignant. This guy could really write. It still didn’t quite dawn on me until much later, when I began trying to write a daily column of my own, how much skill it took him to write this thing every day, this thing that seemed so tossed off, so effortless.

It was damn hard to do what he did. When he died, you know who replaced him? Nobody.

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* As a rule, I’ll do my best but I’m not going to spend much time hunting down the final word on attribution for these daily quotes. If you ever think the attribution is incorrect, drop a line in the comments. (Go back.)