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Effort

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Every reasonable person looking at this debate will agree that both effort and insight are keys to writing. It is also perfectly sensible to note that each author will ultimately determine their own blend of the two in order to achieve their goals. If you wish to select one over the other (a fool's errand to be certain), you must ask yourself which one could never be removed from the equation. Considering that it is ultimately effort which puts words on the page, I am going to argue in favor of Edison's 99% perspiration.

The confrontational reader may at this point suggest that while effort is vital to actually write something, insight is the key to that writing being great. This would seem a reasonable suggestion until you realize that an excess of insight can, in fact, stunt the writing process. Look at the memoirs and journals of great writers of the past: James Joyce, Franz Kafka, even Hemingway or William S. Bourroughs and you will see writers struggling with the blank page. Their heads and hearts are full of insight, but until they break that devastating inertia and wrap words around that insight, they are just a collection of neurotics sitting around with pen in hand wilting unter the weight of their own insight.

Countless great writers have been paralyzed by their insights into the human condition. Others such as Hemingway or Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf or Will Cuppy or Ryunosuke Atutagawa ended their lives due to depression. While one could not establish an absolute causality in either direction between depression and insight, the two are so frequently concurrent that attention should be paid.

You may find yourself saying that insight can be an inpediment to simply writing, but that effort alone is not enough to make for great writing. Case in point: Jane Austen. Jane Austen's novels have been more or less continuously in print since their initial publication. They are required reading in the junior high and beyond. She is an idol to generations of introverted young women around the world. Her stories continue to provide fodder for big screen adaptations nearly two centuries after her death. This is, arguably, Great Writing. Yet if you really look at the content of these stories, you will see nothing more than an honest depiction of the frivolities and intrigues of the period's upper classes. While the social repression of the time prohibited loud and boisterous discussion of these matters, awareness of their existence was hardly anything unique.

In short, it is not insight which makes the work of Jane Austen "great" but the effort that she poured in to their creation. Putting quill to paper and writing down that which everyone was observing was the driving force behind Austen's greatness.

Truly, many writers who capture the zeitgeist of their day are able to do so, not because they are bringing special insight to the table; but because they are making the effort to document often conventional observations. While the "greatness" of such works can be debated (I'm looking at you Harry Potter), there is no shortage of great but uninsightful literature. I am yet to read a great work of insight rendered without effort. Remember that if a piece is effortless to read it is indicative of a tremendous amount of effort in the writing process.

Learn more about this author, Eric Stoveken.
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