Writing is hard

I just Googled that phrase: ‘writing is hard’.  Google spat out this:

Results 1 – 10 of about 202,000,000 for writing is hard. (0.12 seconds)

The first to come up is a link to a post on a blog called the Writer’s Coin.  Interesting site.  You may want to check it out.  I’m not exactly sure what it’s about.  Money and writing, I suppose.

Anyway, his post is about motivation, or the lack of motivation that makes writing so hard.  That’s not a problem for me.  I have plenty of motivation.  I really love to write just for the sake of writing.  And, in my head, my writing is great.  My prose is witty, funny, and profound — all at the same time.  But then I show my stuff to other people (that I literally have to beg to get them to read, “please, honey, please, it’ll only take you a few minutes?”), and it all goes downhill from there.

More often than not, I just confuse people.  It’s all so clear in my head, and it’s clear to me once it’s on paper, but not so for anyone brave enough to read my crap.

I participate on Critters, an online sci-fi/fantasy/horror writer’s workshop.  A few months back, I critiqued a horror writer’s short story.  His was a very good story, but the author had tried a mixture of prose and screen writing techniques that didn’t work for me, and many of the other reviewers.  For whatever reason, the author and I got into an email conversation about writing in general.  He gave me this one piece of advice that I remembered while on my run yesterday:

Not everything you write will sell.

Meaning, not everything you write will be good enough to sell (or even read, in my case).  He said practice, practice, practice, and then write a lot.  He also said to expect a lot of rejection.

So, here I am.  Bummed that my Christmas Visitor story was such a flop, but determined to do better next time.

(huge sigh)

I can do this.

Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.
Anthony Hope Hawkins

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