It’s okay, you can admit it - Why you hate writing - The setup

Writing FAST - Jeff Bollow 2012

It’s okay, you can admit it
Why you hate writing
The setup

I guarantee you, someone out there got this book, reached this chapter, shook her head and frowned. Then she smiled (almost laughing at the rest of us), and thought to herself, I don’t hate writing. I LOVE writing!

If that person is you, please forgive me. I’ve got to talk to the rest of the readers for a chapter. The 90% of people who (like me) have always felt that writing is agony. You can still read along, and see what mere mortals go through. But please sit quietly, and don’t snicker.

Now then, back to you. Pay no attention to her. She’s probably off doing some creative writing exercise anyway. We’re alone now, and we can talk about the truth of this writing crap.

You hate it, don’t you? Yeah, I feel your pain.

There’s nothing worse than knowing you have to plant your butt in that chair and pound furiously at the keyboard for hours on end, thinking the whole time that your work is probably going to be terrible, and another day “writing” will have been wasted.

I know you want to give up. I know you want to chuck the computer out the window. I know you want to scream at the top of your lungs sometimes.

I know.

And that’s why I decided to take this chapter and explain exactly why you hate it so much. Why it’s so frustrating.

And how to beat it.

Because once you see why you hate it, you’ll begin to see exactly what you’re doing wrong.

And then, best case scenario, you’ll be as excited about your writing as our snickering friend.

Or the worst-case scenario, you can get through the writing you’ve just gotta get through.

Like I am now.

It’s okay, you can admit it

It’s probably sacrilegious to talk about what a terrible, evil thing writing is. Especially in a book about writing. After all, kids might be reading this. We don’t want them to think writing’s so awful, do we?

Too bad. The first step in your road to recovery is to understand that we all hate writing. Even that goody-goody from the previous segment hates it (although she’d never admit it). She might not hate is as often as you or I do, but you’d better believe she’s got her moments.

You’re not alone.

To one degree or another, we all hate writing because we all get frustrated by it. In truth, it’s more of a love/hate relationship. We love it when we write something that rocks. But we hate it when our writing is atrocious.

And since it seems to be atrocious more often than not, we hate it more often than we love it.

The trouble is that writing is difficult to grasp. It’s amorphous. You can’t touch it. Or feel it. There are no boundaries or edges to it. You can’t put it in a box.

It’s a giant, shapeless void that doesn’t exist until it’s already done. And you can’t hold it up and say, “this is my writing.”

Oh, sure, you can hold up pages with words on them. But that’s just words on pages. That’s not your writing. Your writing is the effect and the totality of your expression.

The only way someone can see your writing is by actively engaging it. By reading it. You can’t point to your writing from across the room. You can only point to the shape of your writing — the book, the magazine article, the letter.

What this means is that writing has no single result. It does not have a specific, logical outcome, like a mathematical equation would have. It’s all fuzzy. It’s all aesthetic. Even two professional editors at major publishing houses would edit this very manuscript in completely different ways.

But there’s no “right” way to do it. Sure, you can be grammatically correct enough to impress your English teacher, but then a book like Trainspotting comes along, and offers a new “right” way. What about that? Hmm?

And since there’s no “right” way, there also can’t be a “wrong” way. So how do you know if yours is any good or not? You use the same gauge most writers use. You end up comparing your writing to what you’ve read elsewhere.

And that can be a killer.