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 Does this sound familiar?  “The road to success comes through hard work, determination and sacrifice.” – Dolzinski

“The only way to the top is by persistent, intelligent, hard work.”  – A.T. Mercier.

“If you don’t suffer the pain of hard work now, you will suffer the pain of regret later.” – Anonymous (possibly your mother). 

Hard, difficult, sacrifice. Our Puritan/ Calvin founders helpfully embedded the concept that anything worthwhile is accomplished through grindingly sweaty work. Which makes sense, in their new world, everything was hard – fresh water was a half-day project, and if you weren’t diligently working and everyone in the village witnessed your very hard work, then you were not contributing to the always precarious life of the village and community. You were a slacker. Which is not what they called it.

Enough years of this, from religions extrapolated the effort of living to the sheer effort to qualify for heaven and you have our current presentism in the office, the claim we are always crazy busy, our culture of working. All. The. Time.

We in the US, privilege difficult activities and dismiss any activity that is “easy” as unimportant and not worth our attention or our rewards.

This idealization of difficulty informs not only our work culture, but our art culture as well. We expect writing to be a struggle, we anticipate days of anguish, years of bleeding all over the page. Because that’s how it’s done. Conversely, when a project flows, when a novel comes to us as a full-blown gift from the Muse, we cannot believe in its value, it was too easy – we almost dismiss the product because the process wasn’t grueling enough.

Why is easy denigrated? Calvinism, yes, but in the art world, blame John Ruskin, a formidable 19^th century London art critic. Ruskin did a great deal of good in championing and supporting the Pre-Raphaelite painters like Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and Edward Burne-Jones, a group of young men devoted to beauty and meticulous details. The Pre-Raphaelites created art as celebration of classical tales – Shakespeare, Roman myths, the Bible. All recognizable and all important subjects. (Think the painting of Ophelia floating down the stream surrounded by her long red hair and a dense flowering of plants). Ruskin was a fan, especially after Millais painted Ruskin’s portrait.

Enter the first whispers of Impressionism. Whistler (he of the famous Study in Black and White nicknamed, Whistler’s Mother (which she was)), worked in a new movement labeled British Aesthetic – proposing Art for Art’s Sake, and commenting that. “Art should be independent of all clap-trap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear.”

Ruskin on the other hand insisted that “the artist’s main duty is to observe and express nature, which is a representation of God’s goodness. Art that captures this truth to nature could, therefore, uplift the morality of the viewer.”

 When Ruskin, moving from the gorgeous landscapes of JMW Turner, or the depiction of the Annunciation, encountered Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket (1875), priced at 200 guineas—a relatively large amount at the time—Ruskin was decidedly unimpressed:  “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” That and Whistler hadn’t tried hard enough.

Ruskin’s formula was: less effort equaled less quality, or less legitimacy and certainly a lower price.

Whistler was not known for taking criticism gracefully, he took Ruskin to court for libel. During the proceedings, the attorney for the defense asked Whistler how long it took for him to “knock off” one of his paintings. When Whistler responded that it took just two days, the Defense -Holker asked if two days’ labor was worth 200 guineas.

“No,” Whistler responded, “I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.”

And there you have it. (Whistler won the case, but was only awarded about a $1.00, and the court battle against the more congenial and popular Ruskin did not endure Whistler to London society.)

As we become experts in our field, the effort it takes to accomplish our work begins to smooth, the friction decreases, the work, dare we admit, becomes increasingly easy transforming from struggle to an activity we just do because we’ve acquired the muscle memory and an enormous background of data to help us make faster and more accurate decisions. Yes, we can fling paint on a canvas, but only because we have spent years studying the qualities of paint. Our work becomes easy. To us. 

That is why, when asked the inevitable question, how to you do it? Experts often shrug and claim that for them, it’s just easy, or it comes naturally. Often the expert sincerely doesn’t know how she arrived at the answer. 

When we labor over a difficult process, invention or novel, we reasonably break the work into small concise steps. We can show our work because there is so much work to show.  But if the writing is easy, if the characters are speaking to you in their own unique language and you are happily moving through the plot, you would be hard pressed to create the required outline, the list of character attributes, in fact doing so will just slow you down.

So, you don’t.

And when you are asked (and you will be asked) how did you write your book? How did you figure out these beautiful characters, you will have no answer at all. You don’t know. It was easy. 

But easy is not an acceptable answer. Our readers, fans, students want, even need; to understand the steps of the process so they can replicate them. If you can do it, and explain it, they in turn can copy your system and create the same best-selling book. Except those who do something easily make terrible instructors, they simply cannot show their work.

They default to saying – just do it.  

Unhelpful – their fans reply.

What does this mean for writers? 

Experiment with what is easy. This can be in the service of not just your main work: the novel or the business book, but also for your classes, your web site offerings, lead magnets, lectures, workshops. 

Consider all the moving parts of your career and identify what is easy and what is excruciatingly difficult. And by difficult, I mean you dislike the project, you drag through the creation of it, you approach it warily like it’s a teeth baring tiger or a very cranky critic. The easy projects are a pleasure, you zip through them and lose track of time in the doing. The easy projects represent the zone and the pleasure.

Do you do this? One of my favorite conversations is to ask a professional about her work. What does she love? What are her favorite parts?

Her face lights up, and she launches into the subject like a dive into a pool. She is unstoppable and fascinating. I keep filling her glass and encouraging her, reveling in her enthusiasm.

What do you LOVE to discuss? What were your easy projects that really worked out? These are the projects and concepts that will be successful, attract readers, garner accolades. What’s not to like?   

Instead of grinding away at a project you “should” be doing or is important to others, switch it up. Discover and pursue what is easy, what generates flow. Spend time in the glorious moments of complete absorption and freedom.  

When something is easy, instead of distrusting the process and distrusting the legitimacy of a product that was created with ease – embrace it and give it room to shine. Just because it’s easy and arrived fully formed onto the page, doesn’t mean it isn’t brilliant, nor does it mean you can’t charge top dollar for the work.

It does mean that instead of admitting it was easy, say instead, “It was really hard, and I labored for years making it.” Repeat after me.