Continuing my informal series on the journey of an amateur writer, I would like to speak today about the effort it takes to finish a writing project. The gruelling, excruciating, mind-warpingly hard, but at the same time supremely rewarding effort of finishing even the shortest haiku.
Many people embark on the adventure of writing, and do so in blissful ignorance of what awaits them. Far be it from me to discourage them, of course, but I will pass on a word of warning: writing is extremely hard. If you’re just beginning to form an idea in your mind about something you would like to write about, be my guest, but beware of the choppy seas ahead. Don’t set sail in the Kon Tiki. What you need is an aircraft carrier.
Every book that you see in a bookshop or library has come from the mind and pen of a writer, and that writer had to be a beginner at some point. It’s therefore not impossible to complete the journey, but writing is a bit like singing: everyone thinks that just because you can speak, that must mean that singing can’t be that hard. The reality, though, is that few shower singers would be presentable in La Scala in Milan. Likewise, just because you can put words together doesn’t mean those words are interesting, exciting or well presented.
Just because it looks easy doesn’t mean that it is easy.
Like anything else, writing requires thousands of hours of practice, many of them peppered with frustration, performed in loneliness, with no clear goal or end in sight and lavishly garnished with self-doubt. Often you come up with an image that you’re certain will blow every mind in the world away, only to discover that Oscar Wilde used it a century and a half ago. Oh, and before him the Greeks had used it as well, and a couple of millennia before Oscar Wilde at that. So you go back to the paper, to try to come up with something else that might be revolutionary. And on and on for years….
The actual writing itself is also hard. Picture typing out a 200-page novel. It would be a long and tedious process, wouldn’t it? Now imagine having to write it from scratch, inventing all the characters, situations, tension, denouements, etc. Then you have to read it at least twelve times to correct continuity errors, typos, scenes that don’t make sense, sections that are boring or bits that are superfluous. Your 200-page novel means that you’ve just read the equivalent of two War and Peaces!
So why put yourself through all of this? Surely even physical exercise is less gruelling. At least after a couple of months of exercise you can already open jam jars and walk up the stairs without running out of breath. Well, the reason is something I call the Billy Elliot Syndrome. At the end of the film Billy Elliot (by the way, some spoilers ahead. Read on at your own risk), Billy is at an audition and a judge asks him what it feels like when he’s dancing. He is clearly lost for words, as if he’d never even thought about that. He eventually says ‘when I’m dancing I just forget everything. I sort of disappear… I’ve got this fire in my body, and I’m just flying, like a bird, like electricity. Yeah, electricity’. That’s what writing is: you get lost in your own world and nothing can touch you. Nothing is important beyond finding the right word, finishing the next sentence, coming up with the best rhyme. You’re in your own world, so you make the rules. When you get stuck, you have to look in your own mind, force something out from where you never thought you’d find anything. Slowly, the text takes form and where there was only white space you suddenly have the message you want to transmit. Then you polish the text so as to transmit that message in the richest and clearest way possible. After you’ve finished, there’s a little bit of your mind on paper. You’ve made a vase out of a chunk of mud. You have seen the creation of life before your eyes.
That’s why people put up with all the hard intermediate stages and keep coming back for more.
Smyth Díaz 