Floating on the Lazy River

“Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.” 

Benjamin Franklin~Poor Richard’s Almanac

I love those water parks that are encircled by a slow-flowing stream of water. While the kids are running around climbing towers to the top of slides, I can sit back on an inflated tube and float along, no paddling, no kicking, just luxuriating in laziness while floating along with everyone else. It’s great fun until the kids jump in the stream and splash cold water on you breaking the spell.

Laziness isn’t a virtue, but it has its place, “to every thing there is a season and a time to every purpose…” If lazy moments serve a purpose, then one must also accept that there is a time not to be lazy.

When you sit at your keyboard to write is not the time to be lazy. Although the world does not see writing as work, writers who are passionate about their craft know better. The struggle is real. There are days when find swinging a pick at bamboo roots less exhausting than penning a chapter in my book. If you see me busy with a multitude of household chores, it’s because I’m avoiding the flashing cursor on the empty page.

I wish I could say there are no shortcuts and no lazy rivers on which to float along for writers. But we all know it’s not true. Make a big enough name as a writer and you can just phone it in. The writer they were at the start, who was given to the virtues of hard work and zeal, doesn’t need to show up with the same passion. Their name on the cover is enough to “purchase wealth”. That virtue is the price rarely seems to matter.

Success can be a trap. Writers need a thick skin. Nevertheless, those who ignore their bad reviews or believe all the glowing reports without searching within themselves for the truth are easy prey. Alexander the Great is reported to have wept when he found no more worlds to conquer. Readers need to weep for the writer who sees no more possible conquests.

As bad as it may be to fall into a trap, it is far worse to cheat and deceive from the outset. People who set out to game the writing world with AI and writing programs that supply plots and book outlines, anything that goes beyond grammar and punctuation, are lazy cheats. They are not writers; they are programmers, plagiarizing their own machines.

Writing requires a soul driven by passion. Emotion and personal experience are the tools of writing that gave birth to the admonition to “write what you know”. Computers, to paraphrase an old movie, don’t get angry, they don’t get sad, they just run programs. The flaws and fragility of humanity are what create stories worth reading.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Jack LaFountain