The Challenge of Writing

I envy those who write well. I have always wanted to be a good writer, even in high school, but always feared that I was a poor writer and to protect myself had to pretend that I really didn't care much about writing. It has only been rather late in my life that I can openly say that I love writing. I suffer from the delusion that writing should be easy.

I guess it seems to me that writing shouldn't be so difficult. I have the fantasy that writing should "just flow" and after a little bit of editing, it should be ready for print. I know that this is delusional.

I don't like how hard it is to write well. But slowly I have begun to accept this fact, especially as I read books on writing by truly outstanding writers and hear what they have to say. In A Poetry Handbook Mary Oliver writes about the "unimaginably difficult goal of writing memorably. That work is done slowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carrying water in a sieve" (p. 9). Elsewhere in the book she writes that only after revising a poem forty to fifty times does she begin to feel some degree of contentment with it. She writes, "But this is the usual way: hard work, hard work, hard work. This is the way it is done" (p. 111).

It is not, after all, different in this regard from doing anything well, whether it is playing a sport, mastering a musical instrument, or becoming proficient at some vocational task like surgery or accounting. Oh well, back to work...