The secret to the art of writing is, first, it is a job and, second, it is not an art.
So said writers Roger Hall, of Auckland, and Joe Bennett, of Lyttelton, at the Festival of Colour in Wanaka yesterday.
The festival's Aspiring Conversations programme yesterday attracted packed audiences at both presentations, which were as different as chalk and cheese.
While Mr Hall conducted court calmly from behind a lectern, Mr Bennett was as agitated as a live spit roast.
Mr Hall's brow remained as dry as his wit, as he seduced the crowd to laugh through a series of gently told jokes.
Mr Bennett, on the other hand, shed beads of sweat as he flayed his audience with words.
Mr Hall opened the programme with his insights on how it took 15 years to become an overnight success.
He recalled the reactions of others when they learnt he was a writer, such as, "Isn't that lovely? It gives you something to do."
The pitfalls of being a playwright included having the mood of a play upstaged by people talking, such as, "Isn't that a lovely coffee set?"
Getting his works into production required a long journey of faith.
"What you want is a pat on the head and a lump of sugar. You can go a long time without a pat on the head and a lump of sugar," he said.
Mr Hall once travelled all the way to London to talk to the BBC about a script, to be asked, "Why don't you give up?"
"Damned if I was going to let somebody put me off.
"You are going to be crushed. You are going to have rejections. But you have to keep going, if that is what you really want to do," Mr Hall said.
Mr Bennett's treatise on "the art of perfecting non-fiction" unfolded slowly.
First, he traversed subjects such as the nature of truth, airport bomb safety routines, his desire that newsreaders be ugly, and the February earthquake.
When he announced "the greatest lie is God", an "oooh" went around the Crystal Palace.
The sudden oxygen depletion did not hamper Mr Bennett, who rushed on to deconstruct New Zealand's national anthem, and then urinal jokes.
"And writing, writing, writing is so hard. There is so much bollocks about writing," he confessed.
"People often say to me, it must be lovely being a writer. I don't do any 'being a writer'. I be Joe. And I write. It's like brick laying," he thundered.
And so we got the story of how he once worked for a bricklayer - "an artist of bricks . . . he built wonderful, wonderful walls, was a complete bastard, drank all the time".
Mr Bennett is not a vessel through which things appear.
"Go and write. You don't need a grant from Creative New Zealand.
"Go and write something and send it to me and I will tell you why it is crap," he said.
• The Aspiring Conversations programme continues today with Joe Bennett and Rod Oram at 10.30am (debate topic: Clean and green); Rod Oram at 2.30pm (topic: Global crisis, local solutions). Tomorrow: Moana Jackson. 2.30pm (Will treaty claims never end?).
