Here’s the question that’s been plaguing me ever since I started working on a book a few months back: does writing have to be hard?
I desperately wanted the answer to this question to be no, of course not. But everywhere I looked I seemed to find authors bemoaning the agony of their fates as they birthed books into the world — a process often likened to a woman’s labor in childbirth. (More than a little melodramatic, no?)
And yet, as I committed to writing my book and got to work it seemed that every sentence was a struggle. I labored over every word. I worried that I had somehow managed to bungle the book before I had even really managed to start. I wrote the beginning over and over again — never really satisfied with my efforts, always feeling like somehow I’d already missed the mark.
I’m two months in now and I’m no longer struggling as much to write.
Which isn’t to say that my writing is always easy, but it’s no longer always hard.
There’s a lot of narrative among writers that suggests the writing process must be hard if the work is to be good. If you don’t struggle over each story and labor intensely over every word, then somehow your writing will never be truly great.
It’s a narrative that has been perpetuated by many unhappy writers — the myth of the tortured artist is alive and well in many artistic fields today. But personally, I think it’s just that: a myth.
For the past couple of months, as I’ve dived into the writing this book, I’ve been reaching for a new goal: I want my writing to feel effortless. I want my writing to feel joyful and fun and easy. I want the words to flow from my fingertips with grace.
Because this is the real truth: writing a book is a lot of work.
But I think that the work doesn’t have to be hard.
What if, instead, your writing could be joyful?
As I’ve embarked on this book-writing journey I keep remembering how I used to write when I was a little girl. Like many writers, I started writing young. I wrote my first stories in elementary school and by age 12 or so I had written the first hundred pages of my very first (and still unfinished) book.
When I was 12 writing was easy. And more than that — writing was fun. I delighted in dreaming up worlds and characters for my stories and once I had them dreamed up the words seemed to flow from me.
When I was 12 I didn’t struggle so much with self-censorship — that dreaded inner critic that we writers like to spend so much of our time talking about. I didn’t worry about writer’s block — writing ideas were plentiful. I never worried about finding a “great” one, I just sat down, stared at the blank page, and then charged forward with the first idea that popped into my head.
When I was 12 my writing wasn’t great. I’ve been back and re-read the beginning of that book I started writing in middle school and it’s cringe-worthy in places. And, yes, when I was 12 I wrote a lot of crummy stories that had faulty plots and fragile characters — stories that didn’t hold together very well on the page.
But among those failures are nuggets of gold. Poems I wrote not long after that, at age 14 or 15, that really do hold up. Stories that start to catch my attention, to draw me in as I look back at them again, more than a decade later.
Among the wealth of garbage, I also managed to write some things that were unexpectedly good.
I’ve made it my goal to reclaim joy in my writing, and I’m doing it with play.
As adults in America (and this is especially true for women) we don’t play. I’ve been reading Brigid Schulte’s fantastic book Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time
and it’s a fascinating portrait of leisure time for parents (mostly focused on mothers) in American families. But the chapter I’m reading right now is all about the absence (and huge importance) of play.
I think that play is the secret to falling back in love with your writing.
When we talk about writer’s block or the inner critic what we mean is that we’re letting our fear get in the way of the words. Writer’s block is not a state of having nothing to write about — it’s a state of fear that none of those ideas are “good enough” to be worthy of writing down. Writer’s block is an existential crises, not a literal one — because story ideas are everywhere.
There are lots of articles about “20 ways you can beat writer’s block”. But I think the real truth is that you only need one. You need to play.
What if writing was a game? What if your writing was where you went to play?
When I was 12 and I wrote, my writing was a game. It was a game of dreaming up ideas and putting them down on paper and seeing what happened. It was a game of experimentation and getting messy.
Most importantly, when I was 12, my writing was a game at which it was ok to fail. It was a game I always got to keep on playing — even if the story in question turned out badly.
As an adult, I’m finding that the same thing is true. If it treat my writing like a game the words pour out and I don’t worry about them. The story ideas come and I don’t worry about whether or not they’re good enough — I just start writing them and see if they turn into something interesting. (And if they don’t, no big deal, I just move onto the next one).
This new approach has been invaluable. I’ve stopped worrying about finding the “right” beginning for my book. I’ve stopped worrying about whether the scenes I’m writing are the “right” scenes — if they are the ones that will ultimately tell the story.
I’ve stopped worrying. And in exchange the scenes pour out of me easily, effortlessly, and not always in order. The words come out rapidly, joyfully, and with a surprisingly lyric grace that is more artful than anything I could have dared to achieve with a more painstaking approach.
Most of all, for the very first time since I was 12, I feel like my writing has become prolific. Free of worry about doing the writing “right”, I’m finding that the words come at the speed of thought and the pages have been stacking up at a rate I can hardly dare to trust.
If it keeps going like this I might even have to rethink my position on participating in NaNoWriMo — because maybe, for the first time, I’ve finally unlocked the secret.
After all, I just wrote more than 1,000 words of this blog post in 30 minutes. At that rate NaNoWriMo can be achieved in less than an hour of writing each day.
Of course, many of these words will fall to the floor as I go back and revise and tighten up my thoughts and turn this post into something someone else (you!) might want to read.
But I think it’s an excellent example of the point I’m making.
Your writing need only be as hard as you want it to be. And if you want to write with ease, I strongly encourage you to try thinking of your writing as a care-free act of play! 🙂
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