Clinton, South Carolina, Saturday, April 13, 2019, 2:27 p.m.

It has not been uncommon for me to express the belief that the biggest problem facing writers is simple.

More and more people write, and less and less people read.

It’s sort of a double-edged sword, particularly if one happens to write books. Getting them published is easy. Getting them sold is hard. The pie is the same size. The slices grow ever tinier.

Beyond that, though, people think writing is easy. Maybe it is. Maybe it seems really difficult to me because I am a simpleton. I find it quite challenging. Another issue is economic. Some, maybe most, attach degree of difficulty to money earned. Most writers don’t make much money. Therefore, it must be easy.

Lots of people – someone walks up to me at about an average of once a week, and I seldom frequent literary societies – have a book they either want to write, have written, plan to write or want me to write for them.

“I got this great idea for a book …”

Most of the time, I offer mild encouragement. Sometimes I offer practical advice. All of the time, I say that all of my time is spent writing what I want to write, and, with respect, I don’t have the time to write what someone else wants to write. Writing is too difficult for me to dedicate myself to a project I don’t love.

Sometimes there are words that aren’t spoken: I can write, too. Anybody can write. After all, you can write. It can’t be that hard.

Maybe it’s because they have become adept at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and, momentarily, Snapchat. I’m on two of those regularly and a third occasionally, but it’s a long way from whatever it is on Twitter (280 characters?) to 280 pages, which are quite a few more typewritten (keyboarded?), double-spaced.

It really hasn’t changed since the time my grandmother, gone over 30 years now, asked what I did for a living.

I told her I was a writer. Mama Davis looked at me as if I had told her I flew rocket ships, or picked up trash off the side of the road, or robbed banks. Each would have made her equally incredulous.

“See, I go to ballgames, and I take notes about what happens,” I said, straining to make it plausible, “and I write a story about it, and they pay me.”

“Well, I declare,” she said.

 

If you become a patron of mine, you’re supporting writing like this as well as my mostly NASCAR blogs at montedutton.com. If you’ve got a few bucks a month to spare, click here.

Another way I cobble out a living is with my books, a wide variety of which is available for sale here.

 

The new novel, my eighth, is called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Lightning in a Bottle is now available in an audio version, narrated by Jay Harper.