“Is it harder being a writer than it is being a bank robber?”

I smirked when I heard the question.

I heard it while driving in a blizzard, slow, listening to The Score: Bank Robber Diaries, a podcast about Joe Loya, a prolific bank robber.

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In the 90s, Joe robbed 30 banks in California. He talks about some of those robberies on the podcast. He also talks about his life, his childhood and family, what he felt then and what he feels now, hindsight, regret and acceptance, humility, guilt, forgiveness. 

Joe talks about many things, human things, criminal and otherwise. And with such eloquence. And charisma. And vulnerability. I’m on episode 10 and I like Joe. He’s a good guy who did something bad. 

Now he’s a writer. After prison, he wrote a memoir.

Episode 10 is called Your Listener Questions. It’s in AMA, or ask-me-anything, format. One of the questions was:

“Is it harder being a writer than it is being a bank robber?”

Joe laughed. 

“You know,” he said, “the first time I ever got paid for writing was that first bank robbery note.”

I laughed.

“Maaaaan,” said Joe, “that’s a GREAT question.”

I smirked. I thought the answer was obvious. 

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“It is MUCH harder to be a writer than it is to be a bank robber,” said Joe. 

I adjusted the heat. 

“Cause as a bank robber you can be as indiscriminate with your rage as you want,” he said. “I go in there and I see somebody and just throw it at you. Dark Magic, raging at you. And animate you to run to the vault and get me my money and give it to me and then I run out. It’s instant. It’s compact violence. Boom. In and out.”

I did the thing I always do with my forefinger and thumb, when I rub them together. 

“With writing,” he said. “I have to sit there. And I have to be traumatized by it. And I gotta dread coming back to it. I gotta reread it, feel like I’m so stupid. First draft. Second draft. Feel like I hate myself. Tell myself nobody wants to read it. All the anguish. It’s terrible.”

I stopped rubbing them together.

“And even if you’re a good writer,” said Joe, “you still have to do first and second drafts. So you’re going a hard long way, thinking, Oh, I gotta focus, sharpen, focus, sharpen. It’s so much easier to just be brutish. Which is why most people are brutish. It’s much more challenging to try to become a supple person.”

I pursed my lips. 

I was wrong.  

I’m a writer but I’ve never robbed a bank. Joe has though. And according to him, writing is more stressful and taxing than any bank heist.

Something to think about next time you’re blocked, beating yourself up, feeling anxious, feeling like you can’t write, like you should just quit and do something else.

Writing is so hard. Stick with it. You’re doing better than you think.

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