Hacks

With nothing to do the other day, I picked up a book by Annie Dillard. The Writer’s Life.  In it I learned that a real writer will produce X number of pages per day, spend Y number of hours revising those pages, and eventually produce, in Z number of years, a work worthy of being published. Period. And isn’t it nice to know that someone has figured all this out for the rest of us.

Rules. Criteria. Standards. Every field has its own, and this business of finding the right words in the right order is, of course, no exception. But the patent absurdity of any one writer telling any other one writer just how long it will take to manage their masterpiece . . . well,  it gave me pause to think. Because some of us, believe it or not, aren’t aiming for a masterpiece. All we seek is a story well told, a distraction from life’s many burdens.

In a word, we’re nothing but hacks.

Every age, every era, has spawned our like, since before there was pen and paper. Homer was a hack, with his rosy-fingered dawn, and his tales of vengeance and valor. And as for Shakespeare, he wrote for the rabble, even though he chronicled kings. Tolstoy. Dickens. The list goes on. Each one an entertainer. A spinner of yarns, with his eye on the prize, enough ducats to cover the rent. Perhaps one day, posterity would drag out all the accolades, declare each one a genius. But in their time, and to their crowd, they were hacks and nothing more.

So what can they teach us, all those that follow, with our own stories to tell. Just this. We can’t make someone read our words. There is no cudgel stout enough, no promise sweet enough, to assure their cooperation. And so, with no option of force or coercion, we only have one weapon left. Persuasion. We must lay down those breadcrumbs, trace out a path, with just enough twists and turns, doling out treats along the way without ever sating that need. The need to know. To find out what happens next. To learn that somebody somewhere could actually live happily ever after.

And if you’re lucky, God forbid, that someone could be you.

Just one more hack, toiling away, in the hours before the dawn.