When Writing Hurts

Writing is motherf–king hard. It seems really simple. You sit down somewhere, anywhere really, pick up a pencil or open your computer, and write words. Those words, because they’re yours, are automatically meaningful and good as they are an extension of you.

In reality, writing is more like an exercise in self-flagellation. It’s like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when monks alternate between chanting in Latin and smacking themselves on the head with a book. Sometimes words, like faith, just flow. You don’t have to think too hard. They fall out of your fingertips and arrange themselves on the page in a way that makes sense and is pleasing and in that moment you feel very accomplished.

When you write a lot, that experience becomes more and more rare. You find yourself chasing those moments of ease with hours of smacking yourself in the head with a book you wish you had the self-discipline to write. You comb websites that you will tell anyone are trash for inspiration, searching for anything that will lubricate your wheels and make the words come out more easily.

You beg your friends, parents, and dog to tell you what to write. To give you something, anything, so that you don’t have to keep searching for a subject, and then you realize that it’s only when things are this hard that you are actually proud of what you produce. When the words come easy they stick to your skin. The piece itself might be great. It might be one the best things you’ve ever written. It could go viral, or be on the front page of your favorite publication, or win an award but you know that you didn’t work for it. You didn’t earn it. It’s like when you won the 50-meter breaststroke by doing doggy paddle because no one else was racing. Sure, you got the blue ribbon and anyone who wasn’t there will be impressed but it will always feel cheap.

Those words you work for, the words you fight with, they stick to your stomach, your kidneys, and your liver. They go deep into you, digging in their heels as you try to pull them out. Even when you wrench them free and stick them to the page a permanent residue is left where they once were. Those are the words of which you are proud. They might not be pretty but they are your everything because the words that you work for are the words that prove to you that you are a writer.

If writing was always easy and if the words always came, everyone would be a writer.

But publishing a piece to Medium a few times a year when the words “come to you” doesn’t make you a writer just like being in one commercial as a baby doesn’t qualify you to call yourself an actress for the rest of your life. Being a writer is the willingness to smack yourself on the head with a book until the words come out. It’s the foolishness to enter the ring with no certainty of a win and take body shots hoping that something good will come of it. It’s painful and it’s messy and it’s beautiful.

Not everything I write is good and not everything I write comes easily. It is because of that, not in spite of it, that I am a writer.