Hopefully, like suggest here, people are more entertained than they are believing they’re now ‘informed.”

I must admit, I found some of these novelists’ rituals interesting, but I won’t be trying any of them.

I saw very little mention of the hundreds of hours spent typing, the days and weeks spent revising.

Consider the source, though. This is more like a human interest piece, a way to add to the myth and lore of writing rather than the writing process itself.

Isn’t this good, though, for writers who actually put in the time and do the work? And don’t pieces like this help generate interest in literature and sell more books?

It’s like talking about the baseball players who wear the same underwear for an entire post season run until they win the WS or get knocked out of the playoffs. Superstition at it’s most dangerous. After all wearing nasty underwear isn’t how that team made it into the final 8, is it? It’s playing the damned game, and well.

Of course, it’s probably articles like this that help perpetuate the myth that writing well is easy, and anyone can do it. I remember a guy I know thanks to this wonderful Internet who writes screenplays for a living ranting about how someone was talking about getting a novel published after he retired, and how the guy made it sound like a total lark.

As long as pieces like this abound, the real soul of writing skill will likely continue to be disregarded as something simple, because it looks so damned easy, and unlike slam dunking a basketball, it’s harder to get proof of how good or bad you are at putting words on a page in a way that touches people, or at least entertains them.

But I guess I shouldn’t expect any more from a piece about writing fiction from a financial paper, it isn’t exactly their forte.