Writing is f*cking awful.
A love letter by Jocelyn Brady
Can I just come out and say that?
Can I call myself a writer and talk about how bloody awful writing is?
How tedious, and torturous and terrifying to pluck out the precise string of words to make a point, to persuade, to trigger an influx of dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, epinephrine.
To manipulate a brain into caring. Believing. Buying into a new idea or behavior or way of seeing, doing, being.
And it's not this manipulation that makes writing awful.
Because sometimes that's what you need to change minds. To change behaviors. To change the world.
To articulate a dream that turns into a civil rights revolution.
To rally a nation to have hope. To look out for each other.
To protect those persecuted and push us all forward into a more compassionate race of human beings.
This isn't why writing is awful, of course.
Writing is awful because it's hard AF.
Because you almost never get it right on the first try, and when you do, on that impossibly glorious day when your decades of using and thinking about language pays off in an extraordinary feat of poetic persuasion mastery, your own brain tricks you into believing it should always come this easy.
Anyone who tells you writing is easy is a liar.
Or sadomasochistic (in which case, hey, let's party).
Because writing is painful.
It hurts to want to make music with your words, and to barf up all these crude stencils of proverbial lightning bugs where there should be earth-splitting bolts of lightning.
Even after you DO write... after all the spewing and massaging and throwing away and sweating and crying and thinking it'll never work until--FINALLY--you come up with prose that makes your heart sing, and makes people smile, and—maybe, if you’re lucky—makes their life better.
Even after that, a writer is always thinking about how these words can be better. Do better. Do more.
Because like language itself, a writer keeps evolving.
You have to.
You have to keep learning and adapting and trying and failing.
You have to hear people call your work "trash" and rip apart every sentence that you lost sleep over and criticize your use of "And" at the beginning of sentences.
You have to listen to people who don't love, and obsess over, and live and breathe writing tell you how to write. Tell you what grammar rules are. Tell you why you can't split an infinitive.
You have to convince people that writing is never "just" writing.
Writing is thinking. Strategizing. Imagining. Planning. Digging.
(And sometimes crying.)
It's being so curious about the world that you try to see yourself in everyone, you try to see how they see, and think how they think, and do everything in your power to find the words that get them to feel FCK YES. I get it. You get it. We understand each other.
Writing is wondering how the world works.
What makes people tick.
How to make something beautiful out of something we take for granted, every single day.
All of us able to read this can technically write.
We can string together sentences. Make meaning from language.
But to do it well?
We ALL know how difficult it is.
The terror of the blank screen.
The nausea of an upcoming deadline and a TERRIBLE first draft.
And we also all know ...
How fcking incredible it can feel when the words are juuuust right.
There's no easy bridge between those two points.
Stare at the screen until your forehead bleeds. And then just keep bleeding.
But hey, almost nothing extraordinary comes easy.
And look, writing is an extraordinary gift.
These words, the ability to write and tell stories and communicate an idea from one person's gob of brain muck into another person's gob of brain muck ...
THAT is a superpower uniquely expressed by humans.
Words and language and stories are what make us live more fully, understand more completely, and do more than we thought possible.
That's why writing is a special kind of magic.
That's why I write.
It's what I live for.