It Just Looks Easy

WRITERS AND WRITING (381 pp.] --Robert van Gelder -- Scrlbner ($3).

Readers generally take it for granted that writers like to write. It is perhaps also generally assumed that after a little practice they find writing easy. The fact is that most writers find their work desperately difficult, no matter how long they have been at it, and regard the whole literary process as one part pleasure and nine parts drudgery.

Doubtless a few special cases, including geniuses and college sophomores, enjoy the process; writers as a group have to drive themselves to it. As a group they have always been spiritual hypochondriacs, professional sufferers who manage -(frequently) to make a living out of their suffering. No one knows this better than Robert van Gelder, editor of the New York Times Book Review, who has interviewed dozens of authors during the past few years. About 90 of his interviews are now collected in Writers and Writing. Sample testimony:

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: "Writing is agony. I stay at my typewriter for eight hours every day when I'm working and keep as free as possible from all distractions for the rest of the day. I aim to do six pages a day but I'm satisfied with three. Often there are only a few lines to show."

J. P. Marquand calls writing a "curse," says he "heartily dislikes it, always has and always expects to."

Ernest Hemingway: "Most of it is tough going." For Whom the Bell Tolls took 17 months of work, on a daily 7:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. schedule.

H. G. Wells has to rewrite "four, five, six or seven times" before his beoks take on "shape and form."

Thomas Mann: "My unvarying schedule -- seven days each week," beginning after breakfast and ending at noon. His average daily output : a page of longhand.

Robert Nathan: "When I'm really-working I keep at it eight to twelve hours a day, usually writing by hand. I cross out a lot, revise constantly. In impatience I turn to the typewriter and write rapidly, then cross it all out and try again by hand. The work never gets any easier."

W. Somerset Maugham: "I sit down with a fountain pen and paper and the story pours out. However lousy a section is I let it go. I write on to the end. Then the subconscious mind has done what it can. . . . The rest is simply effort . . . polishing, rewriting the lousy parts . . . going over a chapter time and time again, until, though you know it isn't right, it is the best you can do."

Sinclair Lewis: "Writing is just work --there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes -- it is still just work."

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