CRW3930 - Why Write?

Someone in class posted something on the discussion board about the difficulty of writing, which stimulated this (which I decided not to post there, because it only indirectly addressed the main point).

Writing is hard.

Parts of it get easier over time.

Your skills develop so you automatically avoid some problems (but not all of them). You develop a toolkit that works for you so you can use the tools instead of building them every time. You learn to deal with blank page syndrome, not knowing exactly where the story is going, not knowing whether the part you're writing is the beginning, the middle or the end. You learn to accept that you'll need too kill several pages of text so you can incorporate the information throughout the story instead of info-dumping on the reader. Abandoning a story because it just isn't going anywhere doesn't feel like abandoning your child in the woods for the wild animals to eat.

But the real hard part -- creating characters, finding their voices, coaxing them out onto the page, knowing when you should write the story and when you should let the characters write the story -- never gets easier.

Writing has its rewarding moments though.

One day I saw a bumper sticker and the usually somewhat reclusive characters started a conversation in my head (that became a story). I changed a word or two in a sentence and it sang. After chewing my fingernails to the second knuckle because I didn't know where a certain story was going, it suddenly resolved itself the way I had hoped it would. Others read a story that I wrote and said that they laughed or cried at the same places I did. Someone critiqued a story and I saw a new scene, a new direction, a new character. Someone identified a problem and I saw they were right, but didn't think I was stupid for missing it.

That's me. Your mileage may vary.