The pain of writing - not

Some writers love to tell you how hard writing is.  I know a best-selling saga writer who says writing is hard.  Once when I critiqued her first chapter and made some positive comments on it whe replied "It should be.  I worked hard on it. ". She struggles with every word, writing and re-writing.  Writing is hard for her. She has now published around a dozen books, and the process is still hard for her.

I don't buy into that philosophy.  I've never found writing hard.  Putting words on the page is play, exploration, a letting-go.  I think we can get too serious about the act of writing sometimes.  At base, it's putting one word after another down in the page.  It's about losing control a little, giving your subconscious a cue and setting it free to run with it.  And it's about being willing to accept that what comes out won't be perfect first time.

I write my first drafts with len and paper.  My notebooks are full of crossings-out where I've started a section in the wrong place, or I haven't described something and need to put a section in the middle.  At present I'm re-writing my fifteen year old novel Jade, and I've realised I don't do enough scene-setting in chapter one.  I've been adding sections, and deleting and changing those sections, for a couple of days now, but it's an easy, fluid process of writing, typing up the words, reading them, and changing them again.  No big deal.

The only time writing has felt "hard" to me was when I was writing my Water Moon Down novella recently.  But that was hard because of the time constraints.  I needed to write the first draft in a week so I had time to edit it before submission.  I worked nine-hour days on it, far longer than my usual writing days.  But generally, writing isn't hard for me.  I reach my cafe of choice, order my cappuccino, and sit down to write.  My subconscious knows that coffee time is work time.

I'm always surprised by how much good stuff I produce in a first draft.  So much so that when I've done instant writing exercises in workshops other writers have refused to believe I could write anything that coherent so fast.  But forty years of practice have honed those skills.  Even on a bad day a master who regularly practices is going to be better than a rookie.

I'm well past producing my first million words, and probably well on my way towards the second million by now.  And I aim to get there lightly, the way I've written everything else.  I wind up my imagination and set it off to play.  That's the antidote to "writing is hard".

Go out to play, let the voice of your subconscious come out and guide your writing, and you may end up with something that surprises you.  You'll find your authentic voice, and write about things you really care about.  But above all, it won't be painful to produce.  Relax, let, go, and have fun.