When What You Love To Do Is So Hard

You know, when you love something, really love it and you think, because I love doing this so much, I’m going to be great at it. Well, that’s me and writing. I love to write, to sit down and let my pen glide over the paper and see my thoughts materialise on the page. It’s kind of magical.

Part of me, a big part has always thought, “This is the one thing that I could excel at.”

And I began to write and I thought here I am, I’m finally doing it and the first thing that I write is going to be brilliant and everyone is going to see what a genius I am and I’m going to be published straight away and my book is going to change people’s lives and everyone is going to love me.

Well, the truth is I can’t spell and my grammar is horrible, my punctuation is even worse. I don’t know where to put it or which one to use. And the whole science to writing something is really hard for me to grasp. Things like pace and structure, story arc and tension all meld together in one confusing tangled mess. And you know what? There’s an art form to writing, there are rules and people have to like what you write for it to be published. And it has to make sense to more than just me.

I found out that it’s quite easy to write, it’s incredibly hard to write well and to write something that captures peoples attention and imagination, well that’s infinitely more difficult.

What do I do now?

Well, I guess, for me writing is sort of like being a mum. It’s the hardest job in the world but I have these two little people who I love and I’m passionate about and I want to protect. I get up every morning and pray that I’ll make good decisions and pray that I can show them that I love them in ways they’ll understand, pray for patience and gentleness and wisdom. It’s not something that I discard just because it’s hard.

So it is with writing. I will continue to write, hopefully getting better the more I do it. Learning more and more each time I read a book, each time I talk to someone about writing, each time I do a course. And maybe, one day I’ll write something that is good and that inspires people, maybe one person.

I think for me I need to write. I have all these notebooks that I’ve written in through the years, I have journals, letters, e-mails, this blog, stories that I’m writing. It’s something I just can’t stop doing.

Even if I never get published, which I am told should not be the end goal of a writer anyway, I’ll continue to do it because if nothing else it helps me to sort out all the lose threads that seem to get tangled up in my life. When I write things down, my thoughts get clearer and I can see better what is happening and what has happened.

I am a writer.