Writing is easy... or is it?

"Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead." Gene Fowler

Anybody besides me take exception to that comment? 

Yes, writing IS sometimes that difficult (though I usually refer to those moments as "pulling out fingernails" rather than sweating drops of blood). There are tough patches in every story, and once a writer goes pro and makes the writing a job, going to work is sometimes not fun  -- just as any job has a downside.

But if writing is consistently that difficult, then something needs to be changed. 

The kind of story? (If the author's trying to write something trendy even though it's not to his/her personal taste, it's going to be a rough road. What do YOU want to write?) 

The working conditions? (Some writers pack up and go to a hotel for a weekend -- or  week -- when they're on deadline, so they can focus. But even moving to another room, or writing with pencil on a legal pad instead of on a keyboard, can help.) 

The pace? (Has the author committed to too many hours, too many words, too much writing to be feasible along with the other demands of life? And I'm not just talking about people with contracted deadlines here. Any of us can set the goals so high we fail and end up hating ourselves and our story. What's realistic for you?)

Yes, writing is work. But unless it's fun, too -- at least a good part of the time -- take a closer look at what you're doing and what you can change in order to get the fun back, so you don't have to sweat those drops of blood day in and day out.

FAQs -- How Do You Research Jobs?

The heroes and heroines in my 80 contemporary romance novels have held a whole lot of different kinds of jobs, and I'm often asked if I actually did all those things. Was I a banker, a lawyer, a hotel manager? Did I run a bookstore or a B&B?

No to all of those. Maybe in my next life.

I had a fair number of short-term jobs before I settled into full time writing. My longest-lasting job was as a librarian, so when I wasn't busy with my regular duties, I was wandering the stacks and exploring all the intriguing new directions I found. (And even my regular duties helped -- as I re-shelved books, I speed-read them and set aside the ones I wanted to study more thoroughly.) And perhaps most importantly, I'm a reporter by training, so long ago I learned to ask the questions necessary to get a feel for someone else's profession and their daily routine, in order to write feature stories about them.

I was also selective about the jobs I chose and how I handled them. There are professions I never tackled, like law enforcement -- I figured it would be too hard (for me!) to make a cop sound and act like a cop. Or if it was a complex job, I sometimes gave it to the hero -- whose head I was in less frequently -- rather than to the heroine. And then I checked it out with a pro. In the case of my sexy pediatrician hero, that meant having a friend who's a doctor read the manuscript to see if I'd gotten the tone right.

The toughest story, I think, was the book about the two architects -- because their conversation had to always be on a professional level. One of them couldn't exactly explain to the other who Frank Lloyd Wright was and why his Prairie School of architecture was important!

Another challenging profession was in The Takeover Bid, where my heroine ran a junkyard that she'd turned into a classic car business. Though I resisted, she just would not do anything else, so I gave in and read up on classic cars. And when I wrote the book about the two lawyers (The Fake Fiance) I took my attorney to lunch and picked his brain about when attraction crossed the line into unethical behavior.

People love it when their professions are shown accurately and positively, so most of them are happy to help writers get it correct. It helps to have some scenarios in mind of things you'd like your characters to do, and then you can ask concrete questions.