Writing is hard.
I've probably said this before and I have no doubt I'll say it again. Writing is damn hard and if you don't believe me, just think about having to write a five page essay. Doesn't part of your soul just hurt thinking about it?
The thing is, I get the impression people forget that writing is hard. Ironically, some of those people choose not to write and occasionally scoff at those of us who have chosen to study it in college.
Some day I'll have to write a post about how irritating it is to have what I do dismissed as 'easy' in one breath and deemed the most horrific form of homework known to man in the next. But today, that's not the point.
Fellow English majors, college seems hellbent on destroying our love of writing by forcing us to write essays and when we do write creatively, we have to take criticisms for it.
Now, I think workshop is an incredibly valuable tool for a writer. We get too close to our own writing and we need advice. But the trouble with workshops is that they are only as good as the people in them. Not every creative writing class is going to have writers at your level or, preferably, above your level, to give you good critiques and pointers. Believe me, I know.
But I have a thick skin when it comes to my writing because by the time I got to workshops, I had written enough that I knew my general weaknesses. I also knew enough about writing stories to know what was good criticism (and by good I mean useful) and what was just stupid.
It can be hard when you're used to writing because you love it to suddenly have your work picked apart. So then you get caught between hating writing because you have to write essays and being too afraid to write for fun because you've acquired an internal editor who did not come with a mute button.
I'm here to tell you it's okay that writing is hard. It really is. It's supposed to be hard. If it isn't hard, you aren't pushing yourself and if you don't push yourself you won't get better.
Some parts should get easier. Like basic punctuation (although this seems to be a huge struggle even for college students and is a huge pet peeve of mine. I mean, if you read books you can just learn proper punctuation from that for shit's sake. I digress.)
Some days (more like for short bursts of time), writing will be as easy as breathing but those days are few and far between. Don't sit around waiting for them because writing on all the other days is hard.
It's okay to write shit. It really is. Seriously. My dad thinks Hemingway got it right with his 'if I write one perfect sentence in a day it was a good day' or whatever it is but this is, in my humble opinion, absolute bullshit. That's like doing one squat on leg day with perfect form and thinking that will do anything for your booty.
Write a lot. Write stupid shit that you cringe to look at it. Write some halfway decent shit that you get a few good things out of. Write mediocre crap that you can make better. Write a decent poem so you can borrow the two really good images for a different piece. Write all that because somewhere in between all that, you'll write that one line. That one amazing, unbelievable line. The one that when you read again, you can't believe that you wrote.
It won't happen often but I promise you, it will happen. But you have to do the work. Like with squats. You have to do a lot of them, probably with less than perfect form, for a long time (weeks) before you see any results.
Tomorrow is leg day, in case you were wondering why I am so fixated on squats.
Back to writing. Yeah, it's hard. Yeah, sometimes it feels like bashing your head into your desk would be productive. Yeah, you question your life choices on a daily basis.
I've always decided to keep going. I've put in too much work in the past eleven years to give up now.
Don't you give up, either. Ever.
