Is Writing Easy?

[shadowkat]

liz_marks had an interesting post today on "writing", to which she referenced a humorous essay by Steve Martin entitled "Writing is Easy".

What hit me about the post, is for years I did not consider writing easy. I don't now, if I were to be honest. Not entirely. It's hard work pulling words and pushing them into place. Making sure they make sense to people other than me. Drawing was easy. Painting was easy. Weaving was easy. Running and swimming - easy. Writing? Hard. But I couldn't stop myself from doing it, I felt driven to do it. What was easy was coming up with the stories, the tales, the characters, and the ideas. What was hard was figuring out how to put them onto the page in neatly drawn letters. Grammar did not come easily to me, any more than reading did initially, I had to work at it. My gains in the discipline were hard won. I learned to read and write well because I desperately wanted to. I spent hours at it. Days. Months. Years. The ability to do it - was not innate, it was not a god given talent. The desire to do it was, that was innate, that was god-given.

If you want something badly enough you will achieve it, and by wanting I do not mean that casual urge you feel to eat a piece of chocolat or watch a tv show, but true wanting, compulsive need, that itch that keeps you up at night, that drives you, that is the reason you breath.

Ever since I can remember, I've written. Whether it be in my diary, or in a notebook or a typewriter, or a computer. Ever since I can remember - I told myself a story, threaded a plot together, and once upon a time told it aloud to an audience of trees and bushes, maybe a few robins and blue jays in attendance. Most of what I wrote was admittedly crap on a stick. Unpublishable. Not meant for any eyes but my own. A good percentage of it sits hidden in my parents attic, or in a wast paper bin. I have written at least five books in my life time, of the five, only one, my current one, is publishable. I have written over two million words in stories and novels and plays. I write for a living, but it is business writing, railroadese, meant for the eyes of an auditor. The writing I am driven to do, that I have to do, appears either on my livejournal or in my novel. And only the novel is carefully proofed, edited, and rewritten a million, zillion times, before it leaves my hard drive.

Writing for me, has never come easily, but at the same time? I guess it does. It is like breathing, I feel better when I write. And I find I communicate better through written words than oral ones. I trust them more for some reason. I also find that I enjoy writing, for me it is fun. I like the feel of my fingers picking out the words on the keys. I like seeing the sentences form across the page. And I like the surprise of seeing my thoughts spring to life, reading them back to myself, and knowing others are reading them too, my words, my story, my thoughts in their heads. The love is not the same as reading. It does not fulfill the same needs. In some ways, it feels, at times, more selfish than reading does, more self-serving, at others more altruistic. My best writing, I think, is not always thought out ahead of time, but comes only as I type, as I look at the page, my thoughts taking form as my fingers pick out the letters - brain and hands in perfect harmony much like a musician picking out notes on a keyboard as they compose a song, deleting the discordant ones.

Writing in of itself was not always easy. It is work. But it is also play. The drive to learn how to write well was the gift and possibly also the curse. And I think it is different for everyone. I've noticed reading my livejournal that people write differently. No voice or style is quite the same. And people appear to think about how and why they write differently.
But all share the same odd passion for it, or they wouldn't be doing it day after day, week after week - they'd be doing something else. They wouldn't be stealing time to write. Sneaking in a few hours here and few there outside of their regular working hours. And those who write for a living, would not also be writing on a livejournal.

For me...writing is both a joy and a challenge, a pain and pleasure, it makes me happy and cross. I worry over it, and revel in it. It is easy and it is hard. All at the same time. And when the writer's blocks come...they aren't about the writing but the stories that get backed up in my system, blocked mostly by my own fear that what will be transcribed will not live up to the time and effort it took to transcribe it - the hours that I stole to do it, when I could have been doing something more worthy, more important along the way. That what finally ends up on the page will be a mundane waste of my time and whomever happens upon it. It is fear that stops the words, I think, not anything else. Fear of failure, fear of being untalented, of being a rank hack. Fear and vanity. Little else.

Comments

[masqthephlsphr.livejournal.com]

Writing for me, has never come easily, but at the same time? I guess it does. It is like breathing

That is SO me.

I am working through one of the books I bought meant to get you more right-brained in the writing process, and I think it's intended for a more general audience than I fall into. Because there's this exercise in the first chapter where they ask you to think of three words that come to mind when you think of writing. It's meant to get a baseline of just how much you hate it. And the first word that came to mind for me was, "joy".

Writing is very, very hard. Some days it's painful. But when it's working, it is the joy of my life.

[angearia.livejournal.com]

I think writing is easy. Writing well is a whole other matter. It's an area where there's always room to improve because there are so many genius writers out there and you get out of it what you put into it. You can hone that skill, you can get better if you have the drive, inspiration and creative talent.

[moscow-watcher.livejournal.com]

To me, writing in Russian (my native language) is relatively easy. Writing in English is a totally different experience. I suspect that my English is rather a Whedon-English, because I mosty write on Whedon-related topics. Whedonspeak has its own euphemisms, coinages, references etc.

Or maybe it's because I write mostly technical stuff (translations, filmographies) in Russian. While in English I talk about Joss and write fanfiction. I often don't have enough words to express my feelings.

Sometimes I know that I could say it very well in Russian but the wordplay won't work in English. And I'm all *grr*. But sometimes I come up with an idea that can be expressed only in English, and it's so thrilling! :)

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I've always liked what Red Smith said: "Writing is easy; you just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein."

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

I'm sending this link because he also thinks writing is hard:
http://thewriteenvironment.blogspot.com/
and NOT because he is giving advice on doing spec scripts (which I know you don't wanna do)