Lots of saved browser tabs accumulating (and some old mental bookmarks as well) surrounding Cormac McCarthy, who apparently wrote the book No Country for Old Men and The Road, both of which were movies as of late, though he’s been published since 1965, so it seems shallow to just highlight the stuff he’s written in the past 10 years. I mean, they guy’s typewriter sold for a quarter million, and it helped build way more than two books.
But hey, it’s not like I’ve read anything by him. I just accumulate the links and tabs and bookmarks until they spill over.
So.
Item the first, which is the most recent, is from this week by Hugh MacLeod, in which he retells the story of a young aspiring writer asking McCarthy for advice on starting writing. The response was “Don’t do it unless you have to.”
That reminded me of a post from way way back on MemeMachineGo, which retold comics writer Alan Moore’s (Watchmen, V For Vendetta, lots of other good stuff) 5 tips for would-be comics writers. The first, almost not surprisingly “don’t,” with tips 2 and 3 mirroring tip 1 in Fight Club style, but the one that always stuck in my head was item 5, paraphrased thusly: “if you’re going to be any good, you have to commit yourself to it like an ancient Greek or Egyptian commits himself to a god.”
That always stuck with me, but before we drill into that, we’re going back to McCarthy, who John Gruber quoted from a WSJ profile: “Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”
I liked that bit, but that same interview yielded this gem, which was a little less bleak until you think of the ramifications: “If you’re good at something it’s very hard not to do it.”
You know, writing good code isn’t that much different than writing great works of literature, at least from a mindset perspective. I think the biggest thing the blog and Twitter world has exposed is the (not altogether new) talent of making it look like you’re not working very hard on an all-consuming passion.
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