by Matt St. Amand

Created on: February 06, 2009

I've been hearing this debate since my days in college writing seminars, and no doubt it goes back to when people first picked up sticks and traced shapes in mud or on cave walls (sitting around the campfire at night, debating which is more difficult: cave-painting or composing muck sonnets) - and it still strikes me as an utterly ridiculous debate.

The most difficult form of writing to produce is good writing; insightful, moving, funny, infuriating; something that makes your reader want to argue his point to the guy sitting next to him on the train, bus or plane.

Ezra Pound was famous for taking eighteen months to compose his two line poem "In the Station of the Metro". In the same vein as this debate, I would bet that Chuck Palahniuk can do more push-ups than James Frey, and that Stephen King can last longer at the keyboard without a bathroom break than Jay McInerney. Such is the low superficiality of the "prose vs. poetry difficulty quotient debate".

This is a circular campus pub sort of discussion, one that always drove me from the table to load coins into the jukebox so Stompin' Tom Connors and Hank Williams could drown out the flaccid verbal jousting.

Now that I think of it, the people I knew who engaged in this debate weren't even writers. Sure, they called themselves writers and groped through writing seminars - submitting the bare minimum of material each term; reading the weekly creating writing packet an hour before class - and returned to campus after each summer break, sighing, "I didn't pick up a pen the whole time!"

Writing is difficult, period. Producing writing worth scarring a page and taking the time of a reader is a task, a gamble, an accomplishment on par with cracking a locked safe without the use of one's hands (or explosives).

After completing my first novel, I had a newfound respect for every writer who makes it through that mined and unmapped gauntlet. Sure, I've read numerous novels that I thought were utterly terrible. And I think they got themselves written because the writers were caught up in this type of mindset - concentrating on the superficial question of "What's my page count?" or "How many more words until I can quit?" which can distract the most dedicated, soulful writers from the true task - writing something worth reading. Having traversed that lonely landscape myself, I suddenly admired any other soul who would try it.

And maybe Ezra Pound felt the same doubt-noxious hopelessness and lostness when composing "In the Station of the Metro." It's quite possible Dean Koontz or Danielle Steele feel the same anxiety each quarter when they embark on writing a new novel.

Either way, there's no getting around the fact that writing means getting up in front of a reader, usually naked, often off-balance, with only the music of our own voices to fill the void.

What is most difficult? Eschewing such debates and getting down to the business of writing.

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