Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Writing is like bleeding.

"Writing is easy:  All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."  ~Gene Fowler

"There's nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."  ~Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith


Some people think that writing is easy. They sit down at their notebooks, typewriters, or computers and think. I think I'll write a novel about cats today, they say, and begin a line of prose. This comes easily for a while, and before they know it, they've churned out a whole page of Chapter One! Oh, glorious moment! They bask in the shining light of the freshest, brightest, most beautiful page on the planet. Now, they say, with a grin, I'll just stop here--good stopping point, after all, and just go to bed. It'll still be here in the morning.


But morning rises and they sit back down with a pencil in hand, only to find that there is nothing left to write. All the inspiration is gone and that 'glorious moment' of the previous day has left. Nothing lingers.


Writing is easy, they say, but it's just not for me.


This. Is. A. Lie.


Writing is not easy. It never will be easy. There is no special pill that you can get that will give you everything you need to write a best-selling novel. You have to grit your teeth and bear on even when it looks like you will fail. Writing is something that you love so much that you strive for it no matter what, even if it feels like you want to knock a hole in the wall with your head.


Because failure is part of being a writer. We will fail--but that's why we rewrite. And edit. And keep on writing.


Writers are failures, and yet we still succeed. That's why people want to be a writer. They admire us! We get to share our opinions with the world and change people one story at a time. We get to stare out the window to see what kind of squirrels reside there, or spend hours on Google looking up the floor plan of Nottingham Castle. How cool is that?


So. There's my little thoughts on how writing is like bleeding. To sum it all up, writing is like bleeding because it hurts. We slave over a single sentence for days, only to have editors slash it and friends kindly suggest we change it to something else. We fail.


But we keep on writing anyway.


~Mercia Dragonslayer

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