Ramblings: why learning to write is painful

The way that we learned to walk was an exhausting and painful process. The way that we learn to tell stories is even more exhausting and much more painful.

Why? I guess it has something to do with our expectations.

It’s like we expect ourselves to be experts at all of this on day one.

We have these great stories in our heads and we expect ourselves to be able to just write them out. We expect ourselves to be able to write one awesome draft and be done with it. Maybe we’re not naïve enough to expect writing to be easy, but we definitely expect ourselves to be better at it. Don’t we?

But we’re not.

Are you not entertained?

We all know the iconic scene from the movie Gladiator: when Maximus (then known as The Spaniard) defeats six opponents single-handedly in just over one minute.

He had given the crowd the blood that they wanted, but as the dust settled after the one-sided battle, he wasn’t rewarded with the thundering applause he had come to expect—instead his actions were met with shocked silence. Frustrated at this lack of reaction, Maximus hurls his sword into the stands, spreads his arms wide, and asks the question that would be forever immortalized in the minds of 90’s babies around the world.

“Are you not entertained?”

Sharing my Art

Whenever someone asks me what I write (and I get asked this quite often) I’m never sure how to respond. It’s only after a healthy period of awkward silence while I scour my brain for a good explanation of my writing that I come up with a brilliant answer like “I write fiction novels.” Phew! Crisis averted. It’s a good …

Choose to Write

There is an old writer’s proverb that goes something like…   “A good writer writes every day.”   When I was first exposed to this idea I took it for granted, thinking that it only applied to professionals and people who made their living writing. After all, it made sense that professional writers wrote every day, that’s their job. I …