Nothing personal
Author James McCreet considers how much emotion writers need to write
I was once asked during a phone interview for a copywriting job why I was so passionate about industrial air filters. My response (unfiltered) was that I couldn’t give a rat’s jerkin about them.
I didn’t get that job. But my point was pertinent. It’s not the role of the professional writer to care about the subject. We seldom have any choice in the matter.
Whether it’s software, accountancy, law, medical prosthetics or electrical engineering, our job is to understand the detail sufficiently to write well for the target audience. Then it’s on to the next job.
Certainly, it would be nice to care or even to be interested. But caring is a terrible trap in professional writing. If you can only write when you’re interested, you’re going to find yourself frustrated or blocked… and blocked writers don’t get paid.
You might think that creative writing is different. It’s surely not possible to write a novel or short story without being fully committed to the piece, without really feeling the story or theme or character.
I’m not so sure. I think it’s worth considering the benefits of writing without feeling – only with craft.
Learning discipline
Something many professional writers will tell you – journalists, copywriters or novelists – is that ‘being in the mood’ is a luxury they can’t afford. You get up and you go to work. If you’re lucky, the ‘mood’ comes later. Often it doesn’t. That’s the difference between being a professional and an amateur. Or an artist – James Joyce took seventeen years to finish Finnegan’s Wake only because others were paying his bills.