Christina Patterson: Whoever said that writing, or life, would be easy?

The news this week that writing is hard work came, apparently, as a terrible shock to those who believe they have a book inside them. Which, according to some assessments, is every human being alive. Colm Toibin, the masterly author of The Master, declared in an interview that writing gave him "no pleasure". "I write," he said "with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult." Grim determination? Wasn't this the guy who got €100,000 for a single, literary prize, the guy who has been twice shortlisted for the Booker? Talk about gratitude!

You could talk about gratitude, actually, because that was the bit Toibin liked. "I never knew," he said, instantly demolishing that romantic writer-starving-in-an-attic myth, "that there would be money." He liked, he added, selling foreign rights, but the feeling didn't last that long. How long exactly? A year? A month? A week? Twenty minutes , apparently. About the same as a cup of tea.

Quite why this warranted a full page in a national paper remains (like questions of creative inspiration) something of a mystery. Everyone knows that if you put a group of writers in a room, add a bit of lukewarm sauvignon, and perhaps a few peanuts, leave to stir, and listen at the keyhole for Great Thoughts, the key words you will hear are this: advance, agent, rights. And then, a bit later, reviews. And everyone knows that writers, like Scots, are not difficult to distinguish from a ray of sunshine. Stick a super-sensitive soul – with an ego that's sometimes the size of Mars and sometimes the size of a pea – on their own in a room, for weeks, months, years, and you will not end up with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

As any number of writers could tell you, it's just not much fun. "The struggle of writing," said John Banville, in a little patchwork quilt of writers' musings set next to Toibin's shock revelation, "is fraught with a specialised form of anguish, the anguish of knowing one will never get it right, that one will always fail, and that all one can hope to do is 'fail better', as Beckett recommends." And this from a Booker prize-winner. What hope, then, for the rest of us?

Not much, probably, but we can take comfort from this: the less talented we are, the less anguish we'll feel. There are leagues of people who've never written a poem in their life, never read a poem in their life, who take their cat's death, or their husband's mid-life crisis, as an excuse to scrawl a few lines and pop them in an envelope to Faber & Faber. There are leagues of people, too, who will moan, to anyone who will listen, that they're not being published because they're too radical, too innovative, too brave. Not, you note, too bad.

No, it's the good ones who suffer. Howard Hodgkin told me in an interview recently that all he feels, when looking at his work, is what his friend Patrick Caulfield said when faced with a retrospective of his work: "Not enough, not enough." Maggi Hambling declared matter-of-factly that the days she spent in her studio – nearly every day of her life – were "hell, mostly". The Irish poet Robert Greacen once said that writing poetry was like "trying to catch a black cat in a dark room".

But whoever said it would be easy? Whoever said that anything worth reading, or hearing, or gazing at, would be easy? Whoever said that the geometry that underlies the physical structures – furniture, buildings, bridges – that support us was easy? Or the computer codes that underpin almost every aspect of our lives? Or the internet? Easy to use, yes, but to invent? Can you imagine? I can't even work my SkyPlus.

For that matter, whoever said that life would be easy? That an evolutionary experiment with built-in obsolescence, built-in frailty, built-in decline, a scary propensity to survival-of-the-fittest displays of superiority (wars, bonuses, sports cars) and the irrational (Cheryl Cole on Kilimanjaro) would be some kind of a picnic? Whoever thought that wisdom would be easily acquired? Or that lust would be easily metamorphosed into enduring love? Or that greed would be alchemised into wealth that trickled down? Or that statements about the end of boom and bust would somehow, miraculously, turn into reality?

Where did this myth come from, that life should be easy, and that the art that reflects it should be easy? Human life is produced, as the Bible says, "in pain" and so is pretty much any art worth having. If it appears to be effortless then that's a testament to the skill of its creator. And if reading it, or listening to it, or understanding it, involves a bit of effort, then so much the better. You can't have richness without a bit of effort. You can't have layers, or depth.

This week, a (hugely talented) poet friend of mine was talking about one of her creative writing students. He liked the flashy stuff. The postmodernist stuff. The clever-dick stuff. My friend, who has seen a fair bit of clever dickery in her time, just sighed. "I'm not that interested in making things up any more," she said. "I'm interested in saying things that are true."

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