Day 193: The Hardest Part of Writing

I've been thinking about what the hardest aspect of writing is for the past couple of days. I just thought I would put some of my thoughts here on the blog since I've been lingering on it so much. Fair warning, this one may be a little rambly.

First I thought it must be dialogue. At first glance dialogue seems like it's only the words between quotes, but once you sit down to write some you realize it's actually so much more than that. The context a character speaks in is as important to how they speak as the words they want to say or the person they are. How they hold themselves and their body language can completely alter the inherent meaning of what they've said, and if you can't convey it properly, what ends up on the page will be nothing like what you have in your head. It is absolutely maddening to try to get dialogue to not only sound natural, but go in the direction you want. Sometimes, when the dialogue finally starts to sound good, I find that the characters begin to say things that I don't want them to say! It takes the story in the wrong way and makes everything that much harder. Of course trying to fix this directly makes the dialogue sound unnatural again, and then I have to start all over with context. Not that I'm complaining or anything. Writing dialogue is often the most interesting part of the work. And since it can be so interesting it's ultimately easier to march on through the difficulty, in my opinion. It can't be the most difficult thing about writing because it's the thing that keeps me coming back the most often, even if it probably is the most technically challenging part.

I think the real difficulty of writing is the difficulty inherent in everything else that's hard. Dealing with boredom. When learning anything, the greatest barrier I encounter is just the simple fact that my brain hates wasting energy. If I don't get enough out of learning something to feel rewarded, then I can't focus long enough to really learn anything or achieve something with what I learned. Some silly lizard brain part of me just hasn't clued in to the fact that I can eat as much food as I want pretty much whenever I want. I have to convince it every, single, time that wasting a bunch of time and energy learning something I want to learn for the sake of learning alone is not a big deal anymore. Maybe my caveman ancestors would have died because they spent too much time scrawling random words on a cave wall, but I almost certainly won't.

The first thing I focus on when doing anything is finding the motivation to do it. If I can't do that, I know I'll never get there. Sure, I could come up with the most efficient possible way to learn something. But then I'd never learn anything because that way is simply too boring. It's the same with writing. I have to find something interesting to do to keep going otherwise I'll never get anything down. It is a constant struggle and even though there are lots of difficult parts of writing I think this is easily the most demanding part. Sometimes I find myself taking the most direct path to the end because that's the way I know I can get it done fastest. After a couple days of this I get bored though, and then I remember that it is a losing strategy. At that point, I go write whatever I feel like writing, and usually I can bring it back around to what I wanted sooner or later. Even if it's wasted, at least I was writing the whole time anyway.

What is your biggest struggle with writing? Is it plotting? Sticking to a plot? Boredom like me? Self discipline, or maybe self doubt? Let me know what it is you struggle with because I'm curious to know.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley