Writing is Easy!

What's that old quote about writing? It's easy: you just stare at the blank page until drops of blood form on your forehead. Something like that. I could look up it, but I'm lazy. Anyway, the idea is clear. Recently I've grown a new appreciation for the difficulty of writing. It's weird that this should come to me now, since I've been writing seriously the past several years. It's the one thing I've been devoting the majority of my adult life to, and yet it seems harder now than it used to. Maybe it's that old thing about if one really knew how difficult it is, one would never attempt it in the first place.

I don't even know that hard or difficult or tough or whatever is exactly right. The thing that has struck me most recently is simply how long it takes to write well. How slow it is. I've been rewriting my kids book, and, admittedly, some of my slow pace in proceeding through the pages comes from not spending as much time bleeding from my forehead as I could. Instead of writing, I do other things: I watch TV, I work in a bookstore, I read, I grade papers, I prepare quizzes about punctuation, I apply for full time jobs, I do things related to writing like sending out stories to magazines or applying for grants. Sure, all that stuff eats away at my time and some of it is unnecessary or could be eliminated from my schedule so I write more. But that's not even what I mean when I mention that my writing is slow.

When I am actually sitting down working on my novel, I move at a slower pace than I remember in the past. I take more time sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. The result is good. I think the new draft of this book is coming together really well. When I finish this second draft, I think it will be closer to the strength of a third or fourth or even fifth draft of my past work. I'm now focusing more on the issues of language, the specific details that make the story pop. Perhaps part of the reason I can do this already with my first revision is that I pretty well worked out the story in the rough draft (which was the fastest I've ever written), and now I don't have to go through and sift out the actual story from the mass of material to quite the extent that I often do after finishing a rough draft. This isn't to say that I'm not also doing this. I know there are things that need to be cut or added. I know that some chapters go on too long or end in the wrong place or that characters come and go haphazardly. But as I read through and rework what I have, I feel pretty confident that much of the piece, the skeleton, is strong and solid and will hold up. So rather than moving around major items and transplanting passages of text, I'm doing the cosmetic surgery already and analyzing the language in detail and attempting to convey the story as efficiently and effectively as I can. And that is damn slow going.

I sit and stare at sentences and think about how I can put images and sounds and smells into the reader's head. I try to eliminate clichés or alter details that are vague. I read over paragraphs to see if the words flow, if I'm repeating myself, if the sequence is solid or if I'm forecasting events that should come further down the page. I'm concentrating on what I do at every moment (or at least as much as I can). And although I'm so far quite pleased with what I'm producing, I wish I had more pages in my file marked "Draft 2."