September 20, 2021
“Why Is Writing Hard?” and the Fallacy of Writer’s Block
The quotation marks around the title question, why is writing hard, should reveal that it’s a question many authors ask. Well, if we believe Google, at least. In any case, this is something I have also seen in private conversations.
To be fair, in such contexts the question is more implicit. That is, people don’t generally ask directly why writing is hard. Still, I have definitely detected such a mindset.
For instance, when I met an acquaintance after two or three years, he remembered I’d told him I was writing a book – that was Apognosis. “I can’t believe it,” he congratulated me, “you’ve written a book!”
I realized he’d thought I was writing my first book. Since I generally don’t advertise about my traditionally published past, people aren’t aware of it. I couldn’t resist teasing him a bit, so I said (which was the truth): “Actually, I’ve written another three since we last spoke”. You should’ve seen his face. The poor guy was looking at me as if I’d just told him I’d squared the circle.
So, why do people think writing is hard? More crucially, is writing hard? The answer is yes, but probably not for the reasons you suspect.
In this post I’ll try to answer why, in my opinion, indeed writing is hard, and why you should care as a writer (and perhaps reader). If our goal is to produce better literature, we need to know why it’s difficult.
Why Is Writing Hard? Because You Ask the Wrong Questions
A little tongue-in-cheek, I know. A bit self-referential, too; I can’t help it. But that doesn’t make it wrong. Writing is hard, because people approach it from the wrong perspective.
For most people (writers included), writing means “you just sit down and come up with stuff”. Of course this is far from the truth. Writing is about experiencing and remembering. Writers are not… writers. They are experiencers. A good writer is someone who feels the world in a way that, arguably, most people don’t. Then, having tried writing about it enough times, they know what to do to bring that experience to the foreground (often in a way that differs from “reality”, precisely in order to make a point).
Writer’s Block Doesn’t Exist
Writer’s block happens when there is a disconnect between your mind and the screen. In other words, writing becomes hard when you feel there isn’t anything worth saying. It is overwhelmingly more likely to suffer this if you “ask the wrong questions”, that is, if you approach writing from the wrong perspective.
If you fail to see the experience and memory preceding writing, then writing is hard. Real hard. An author who tries to “come up with stuff” doesn’t feel a need to write. “I want to write” is hard, whereas “I need to write” is easy. Writer’s block doesn’t exist for writers who express experiences.
But why?
Understanding this can help us write better and easier, too.
Why Writing Is Hard When You Try to “Come up With Stuff”
Writing as art is about affect. I’m amazed at the number of people who think writing fiction is narrating a story. It’s not! Fiction as art is about narrating affect; emotions, thoughts, states of mind.
To put it bluntly, nobody gives a rat’s posterior whether Hamlet became or not the King of Denmark; it’s all about how he feels, how he reflects, how his plight forces us to ponder on our own ethics, mortality, and fear of inadequacy.
When you try to “come up with stuff” you’re making it difficult for yourself, unnecessarily so. You try to reinvent the wheel, in a sense, by trying to devise a plot while at the same time trying to understand and create some emotional framework surrounding it.
Much easier to start from an experience you already possess, then come up with a(ny) plot to serve that experience.
In other words, you ought to proceed like this:
Experience → Memory → Concept → Writing
Why Writers Fail
Sadly, many writers operate as I described further above. They focus on the plot, sometimes excessively so, and make writing hard for themselves. How? By prioritizing plot and thus having to reinvent the wheel:
Writing → Experience → Concept?
Indeed, many times making experience fit the plot – whereas it should be the other way around – proves so overwhelming, that writers give up. They either give up altogether (that’s why so many books are left unfinished), or in terms of being unable to produce a narrative that is balanced in terms of affect, meaning, and experiences (that’s why so many authors end up with something they don’t like).
To go back to Shakespeare, though I wasn’t in his mind when he wrote Hamlet, I’m willing to bet he was thinking about the concepts (revenge, inaction, mortality) and his own experiences and reflections long before he found the sources that led to the plot of Hamlet.
How to Make Writing Easier
Writing is hard, but not because there’s anything particularly hard about storytelling itself. Indeed, storytelling is an inherently natural human activity. We’ve been doing it since the dawn of time. The reasons writing has become hard is due to reasons outside writing as art.
- Writing is hard if you’re preoccupied with plot.
- You’re preoccupied with plot if you want to write (rather than needing to).
- You want to write if you see it as a profession, if you want to impress others or yourself, if you’ve been working on a novel for a long time and can’t give up on it, or for any other reason outside need.
I’m oversimplifying it, to some extent, but the basic ingredient of finding it hard to write is the want/need split. It really is that simple: If you feel a fire of experiences burning inside, writing is easy. It doesn’t necessarily mean it will be good (remember, you’re the only gauge of that), but it’s easy.
On the other hand, if you don’t have anything particular to express, then writing will be hard (do you really need me to tell you that?)
If you want to make writing easier, my advice is simple (but you probably won’t like it): Don’t write unless you have an experience or a thought, a feeling or an idea so powerful that you can barely think anything else. You wake up feeling it, you go to sleep thinking it. You might even dream about it.
And then you write about it.
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I make my writing intentionally hard, but have a line in my written process that takes this into account: I almost always switch between main characters, which means a new scene is significantly different from its predecessor, and the line states, “Become the character.”
This is a problem for a little while as I think how I’m going to use the space my structure has created, which includes very broad details such as why this scene, a list of the things that need to be considered for this particular scene, and how is this scene going to pull in the reader’s emotions. It makes me come to a scene fresh. It feels awkward every time, but it also allows me to drill down into the basic questions of how a scene fits into its chapter, and into its book.
It always feels awkward. It can take days to settle into the new mindset. But it always includes a tip from a prolific author, Rachel Aaron, who asks Why have you been waiting to write this scene forever? She calls it Enthusiasm – it’s the starter fluid for the fire. I keep pulling at all the threads until it unravels the knots – gives me something to set up the loom – and then I can’t stop myself from weaving.
Very interesting insights. I can visualize how such a strategy can be useful for your purposes (and genre), though likely it’s something that wouldn’t work for me, as my narratives have a deliberately very narrow focus characters-wise. In other words, I favor connectivity and identification/relatability, rather than wide scope. There’s no universal right/wrong, only what works for one’s own purposes.
With a planned 500K and over 65 named characters (including three horses) so far, if I don’t keep my planning tidy, no one will be able to follow. Mainstream fiction/doorstop/epic – whatever. But the focus on the three main characters has to carry the whole.
I write by the flashlight analogy: if you follow the main path, you have to be able to see, without leaving it, as far as you can shine a flashlight down the sidetracks without loss of detail. And no more, or we’ll be at this forever.
My approach to writing a novel (as opposed to Physics that is easy) is a philosophical idea I feel very strongly about. It usually has to do with social justice, the destiny of the human species, the options for human happiness and the dangers in humanity’s path toward extinction. Once I have an idea, I usually think of characters (that often include my alter ego) that I have met before and who I think will carry the main message of the plot. Then I have a central idea for the plot but only a nebulous outline in my head of what stages these characters have to go through and then I start writing. After each chapter I ask myself: “what’s the next logical thing to happen? – without losing sight of where I want to end up. I have followed this script twice already in the two novels I have written and, somehow, it worked out fine by the end. I am not suggesting that this strategy would work for others, but it is mine and I will stick with it.
And that’s precisely the right thing for an author to do: write the way it works for them.
It’s of course nice to incorporate new ideas, and even try a different way just to see whether it’d be even better – that’s how we learn – but overall, writing is a strictly subjective endeavor.
Some writers do a common mistake, They convince themselves that the time is not suitable to write. They desire to wait until they have enough time to write.
Why is this way of thinking bad?
Your writing will suffer if you wait for inspiration or ideas to come to you. There is never the ideal moment to write a masterpiece.