The Slog

The slog

I love writing, I really do. I love thinking about it, I love reading it, I love creating characters and situations. I even love figuring out how to reword sentences to make them sound better or condensing and changing tenses. But at some point in the writing process it becomes a bit of a slog, an endurance test.

We were reading this morning about the story of Noah and how God told Noah to build a huge boat. So Noah built the boat and when it was finished God filled it with animals and Noah’s family. Then the rains came down and the floods came up (as the song goes). For some reason today I was reminded that in between God telling Noah to build the boat and it being finished was the time it took Noah to build the actual boat. Talk about a long haul project. Building the ark must have taken years. It doesn’t actually say in the Bible how long it took to build the ark. But I’m thinking it must have been a while and it must have been a bit tedious at times.

Well writing I guess is sort of the same thing. You get an idea or someone gives you one, you’re all excited and you start off and you write your heart out. You build on your story and shape and refine the characters and plot and structure and dialogue. Then you write it again. Then you send it out to people who read it and hopefully give you good constructive criticism. So you write it again. Then comes the grammar and the punctuation and if you’re me lots of spelling typos.

One thing I’m learning about writing a book is you can’t be in a hurry to finish it. Because writing a book isn’t a one-person thing, it takes a lot of people to for a book to be written.

I feel like I’m in the murky marsh, all the exciting parts of writing have finished and I’m in the tedious, sloggish part.

I’m hoping that writing a book is like being in labour. When you think you can’t take another minute of the contractions then you know you’re almost at the end. We’ll see.