Writing to keep Afloat

For just a minute, I want to talk about the will to go on writing because writing is pretty much the most consistently hard thing in my life.

Everything else that is difficult has a seasonality to it. Planting and tending my garden goes away in the winter. Tending my children’s needs changes from day to day and age to age. The hardships of life eventually end and a different one begins.

Other hard things get easier with time. When I first learned to make fresh milled bread, it was extremely difficult. Now, it is only moderately difficult. Systems and routines and practice make everything easier, at least in my experience.

But writing is not one of those things. It is uniquely frustrating.

Yes, I have gotten much better at writing in the two decades that I’ve been doing it. Yes, I’ve learned from taking courses, reading books, watching videos, etc. My grammar, sentence structure, word choice, paragraph structure, scene structure, story arcs, character work, and everything else is better. Maybe even good. But writing is still just as hard as it was when I was ten. Harder even.

I spent so much time improving my technical writing. I still make mistakes, but they are not as glaring. I spent even more time improving my voice and style. Who knows if they’re good yet. But even after all that work, there are still a thousand things I could add to any given manuscript to make it better.

This really became apparent to me when I listened to the First Chapters series on the podcast “Lit Match”. In their Harry Potter episodes, they deep dive the first chapters of all of the Harry Potter novels. I am very knowledgeable about that series, and it is just mind-blowing the details Rowling was able to include in the first few chapters of the seven book series that don’t see a payoff until the later books. This level of planning and execution makes me feel like my brain is a colander instead of the steel pot that Rowling’s brain must be.

So I want to write like that. Or like NK Jemisin with her beautifully perfect “Broken Earth Trilogy”. How she stayed so focused on prose while weaving such an intricate world and still managed to drive her characters to their knees, I don’t know.

Or, I want to write like Ursula K Le Guin, who could make you feel connected to any type of person whether earthbound or starside. And with beautiful writing to boot.

So now when my writing is better than ever, there is more pressure than ever to be not just merely good, but great. I can’t depend on good prose to pull together a shoddy character arc or to fill in the gaps of the world. Everything must be good or else the whole thing collapses. There is more work to be done than ever.

After you go on this long journey of improvement and get to the place where you realize a work as long as a novel will always need more work, what do you do? How do you have the will to go on writing when there is no finish line?

The answer is that you don’t. I don’t really have the will to go on writing. For me, writing is a compulsion. I can’t go more than a few days without writing before I feel like all the accumulating words in my brain will burst my skull. It spills out of me daily as an overflow of my being. And I couldn’t survive without it.

If it came down to me wanting to write, wanting to sit down and churn out words, I don’t think I could do it every day. So, if you are struggling to find motivation to write when you want to be published so badly, you might want to ask yourself some hard questions. Mainly, do you want to be an author, or do you want to be a writer? Both are noble pursuits, but becoming an author of a work you love when writing is like pulling teeth will be painful. Will alone will be a very hard sustainer.

Writing is hard, but like all artistic pursuits, it should be enjoyable and largely compulsive. If you don’t ever want to write, maybe you’re not a writer.