- Chapter 26






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An Afterword on Dr. Johnson
Eric Flint
For those of you who have the misfortune to be ignorant of the personage of Dr. Samuel Johnson, to whom I referred in my preface, he was a prominent eighteenth-century literary figure. He was born in 1709—the same year as the passage of the Statute of Anne, the first real copyright law in the English-speaking world—and he died in 1784. He was the author of the famous A Dictionary of the English Language, many literary works, and was the subject of James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, probably the single most famous biography ever written in the English language.
Johnson was also a renowned quipster, and even people who've never heard of him have usually heard some of his wisecracks. Probably the three most famous are:
 
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
 
Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
 
And:
 
Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
 
Not surprisingly, since he was a writer himself, many of his remarks focus on the writer's craft. Here's one of my personal favorites, since I'm also an editor as well as an author:
 
Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
 
The best-known of all his quips about being an author, however, is:
 
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
 
Professional writers love this line—and I am no exception. But what's really fascinating about it is that it's perhaps the single most blockhead statement ever made about being a professional writer.
Why? Because, second only to playing the lottery, the business of writing has got to be the chanciest way to make a living imaginable. There are a few exceptions, granted, and those are the authors best known to the public. But, taking the profession as a whole, it is quite literally true that the average short-order cook, waitress or hotel maid will earn more at those trades in a lifetime than the average author will at theirs.
The truth is, I could with far greater accuracy state that no man but a blockhead ever wrote, thinking he'd make money. I do not know a single writer—and I am no exception—who began writing because he or she really thought they'd earn a lot of money by doing so. They did it simply because they had something they wanted to say. If they could get paid for it, of course, all the better. But they would have written anyway.
So why do authors love the quip so much? Partly, I'm sure, because it stiffens our resolution as we sally forth to joust with tight-fisted publishers. But I think the main reason is that the wisecrack is our all-purpose shield to fend off the inevitable accusation from many reviewers and some readers that the author is clearly prostituting himself or herself, forsaking the demands of The Art of Literature for the sake of filthy lucre.
It can get annoying, sometimes. I once said to a particularly persistent critic of mine that if he conducted himself in his own line of work the same way he demanded that I conduct myself as an author, he'd be fired from his job inside of a week.
Any job.
So it goes. No man but a blockhead ever wrote, thinking everyone would like his work.
 
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