Barbelith Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing > What's so bad about being a hack?

Perhaps this is because they are pressured into producing more work than they would like by publishers - perhaps their own quality control has gone to pot.

Stephen King is not pressured, or do you think the editors still have the guts to boss him around? Considering the editing his novels need, i guess they just print whatever he gives them, when he wants to give them.

The reason why he writes such crap is because he needs to be always working, without leaving time to think about what he's writing - he's one of those who prefers quantity over quality, and then we get crap about Hotels that forget their own boilers are about to explode - talk about a Deus Ex Machina ending, you couldn't get worst even in comic books.

I agree that any writer who writes purely for the love of writing is probably either terribly unworldly or already filthy rich. The idea that artists of any sort should be above material considerations annoys me; Cyril Connolly wrote that

'There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall'

- i.e. that responsibilities force a writer into hackdom to pay his bills

Yeah, like everybody else they have responsabilities, but they're in a too important medium to work just for money, and rather than just writing a lot, they should first and foremost write well - but i think even the readers nowadays are getting tired of having to think too hard about what they're reading, and prefer formulaic plots where all imagination is extinguished in detriment of a quick resolution seen a mile away.

That's pretty much what he says too, citing Chandler as an example of someone the 'great and the good' are sniffy about.

Who would say such an awful thing about poor Raymond? If it weren't for him and others like Dashiell Hammett, there wouldn't be the pulpy hard-boiled literature of the '30's that influenced so many writers in future years - why, even Robert Towne owes something to Chandler for his Chinatown movie - I already hate the critics even more now; for once Stephen King is right.

Then King isn't a hack then, 'cos on page 301 he said he did it for the love of writing and he wouldn't lie to me would he?

He's a hack for preferring the quantity over quality, anyway; just because he loves his work, doesn't mean he writes well - Ed Wood LOVED movies, and he's famous for being the worst director of all times.

Well, he does, you know, do it an awful lot... a thousand words a day, every day for the last forty or so years. Stands to reason you'd pick up a thing or two about the mechanics of it, in all that time.

So he's obsessive about his work and can't stop working; he can write every day, but if he writes the same stuff without ever evolving, then what has he learned at the end of it? His work has stagnated, he's been out of fresh good ideas for a long time, and his work is only slightly better than the ordinary hack writer.