Writing isn't hard.

Let's reframe the story you're telling yourself about writing in order to be free and create the work your soul desires (and an experiment I hope you will agree to)

I’m wondering how you felt when you read the title of this post. Let’s pause and just sit with whatever came up for a moment before continuing…

Writing isn’t hard.

Does anything rise up in you? Track whatever does, write it down perhaps, and set it aside for now as we will return to it.

It’s very possible the title of this post feels irritating to read, a little triggering, perhaps eye-roll inducing? I’d like to say that I once would have felt the same, but I actually think in this one regard, I’ve pretty much always considered writing an act of immense pleasure and would not have described it as “hard.” I wasn’t exposed to the culture of writing-as-torture until I got to my MFA program and started breathing in the writing is hard, sit at the typewriter and bleed programming that seemed to be as common as air.

Now, before we go further, I want to make clear that writing well, or maintaining any sort of deep creative practice takes an incredible amount of dedication, tenacity, verve, fearlessness, bravery, discipline—so much discipline—study, stamina, ability to bounce back from rejection, more rejection, and a little more rejection yet, and the craft of writing happens to be a skill that can take years and years to hone, YES. There is enough terrible writing out there to confirm our suspicions that this thing we’re trying to do is no less difficult than say becoming an Olympic gymnast, but I refuse to call it “hard.” And so should you. Here’s why.

Something happens when we label something as hard in the brain. Hard is, in most ways, a negatively-charged word. If something is hard, then maybe it’s also something to avoid doing. It even feels a little bit like complaining, like perhaps it would be easier to spend a lot of time talking about how hard something is versus actually doing it. The problem with this is that we start to program this as a truth in our brains. Writing is hard, life is hard, it’s hard to get published, it’s hard to find writing community, hard hard hard, and pretty soon, I do think this line of thinking brings us into what I think of as a low vibrational space where creativity is, sadly, hard to come by.

Our brain hears us say writing is hard and over time, well, it believes it. And when it settles into a belief, we are also then making (often very unconsciously) decisions from that place. The decisions we make day to day from that negatively charged place wind up being our lives.

With most writers, I generally think the writing itself is quite far down on the list of problems that actually need tending. Generally, a writer is pulled toward writing because they find freedom in words, they can express themselves on the page in a way they can’t in other ways, and they yearn to connect with others through story. For me, writing fiction is the way I make sense of the world, how I explore my interior corners, and also, how I have a lot of fun. It might sound strange, but nothing is more fun to me than feeling that spark of an idea and rushing to the page to find out what’s going to happen. It’s a total act of surrender and discovery that I feel privileged to witness, honestly. It’s too sacred to call it hard. I feel too chosen, too lucky to have been given this impulse to create.

I know that others feel this way too, but more than ten years of teaching, freelance editing, and one-on-one coaching has taught me that this feeling gets buried along the way and other truths take over. The most common refrain that fuels the fire of low productivity (when a writer wants to write but can’t seem to make it happen), feeling blocked (they sit down and nothing comes) and the paralysis of being unable to finish a project, or find community, etc. is always a core belief that writing is hard, too hard perhaps, for them to ever enter into its good graces.

That’s when I see a big outward turn happen. An external focused fixation is born: the hope is that if they take the right class, get mentored by the right person, find the right writing group, get the latest “craft tip”—then then then…writing will stop being hard. And all of these things are wonderful! I love taking classes, have a bonkers amazing writing group, and love a good craft tip as much as anyone, but I know deep down that these things are an outpouring from my core belief that writing is a joy, writing flows easily, and writing is for me and within me. It’s not something external to chase. But when this gets flipped, issues arise.

I think we’re in a time of a ton of noise. Here I am, adding to it. Don’t think I don’t see that irony. But a lot of the noise around writing that I see is reinforcing the idea that writing is hard and that all we need is one more trick! Have you tried setting a timer? Have you tried paying one hundred bucks a month to login to zoom and write at the same time as ten other people? Have you tried just taking one more class on characterization that will surely unblock you? Have you taken a course on how to write a perfect query letter and have you taken a course on how to find comps and have you read the mind of agents through telepathy to see what they really want? Just kidding, sort of. Outward, outward, outward. And of course, have you talked enough about how hard this whole gig is until your face is blue and you feel sick? How is that working? Is that bringing you closer to your project or further away?

What I want to offer with this, is again, not that these things are bad per se. I think it’s smart and definitely the writer’s responsibility to do what we can to educate ourselves on how the industry works, how to write a decent query letter, and when the time comes, which agents and editors might be well suited for a project, but to me, these are separate from the practice of being a writer, from how we approach the work, how we regard the work, and what the work means to us on the deepest level. You can know everything there is about query letter writing and still not have dug deep enough to have written the work your soul yearns to write.

I’ve probably lost some of you at soul. But if you’re still here, can we all agree that maybe writing and art making is about as spiritual as it gets? I’m sorry—you’re telling me I sit down every day and transcribe a story that is unspooling from my unconscious mind onto a page and characters are acting out scenarios that (if I do things well) may evoke an emotional response in another person I’ve never met on the other side of the world? Is that not magic to you? Is that not fucking incredible? Are we not so damn grateful that we have chosen to spend life this way. I mean, we could just be watching TV instead and then die, but we get to do THIS?

That’s not hard, that’s goddamn amazing.

So what is hard about writing, then? Don’t worry, we’re getting to it. What’s that uncomfortable feeling we get sometimes at the keyboard that makes us want to stop? Don’t think I’m saying I never feel that. I do. But this is when we must reframe: The act of writing itself isn’t hard, it’s everything that gets in the way. I want us all to separate these things from each other now.

And I don’t mean, like, finding time. Finding childcare. Finding quiet. Coming up with a good idea. Again, these are externals! These are things that if we do this INTERNAL reframe, will begin to solve themselves more easily because we are making decisions from a new place entirely. In fact, we might not struggle any more with them at all. When I look back and see the conditions under which I wrote my first three books, I can confirm that these external barriers will not stop you if you have lit that internal flame and are doing the necessary personal work to clear the way.

I wrote pregnant and sick, I wrote with a newborn strapped to my chest, I wrote during a pandemic, I wrote with no money, I wrote with a body that was revolting against me, I wrote when my parents died, I wrote during the many alcoholic disasters they served up, I wrote I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. I wrote when it was noisy, I wrote when I was tired, I wrote in a grocery store, I wrote on weekends, I wrote in spans of thirty minutes, I wrote with no agent, I wrote with no book deal, I wrote like my life depended on it, because guess what—it did. I do not say this lightly, believe me. I say this with so much respect for this thing we do, and I have a feeling that if you are here, and you feel compelled to write, you know what I mean. The feeling of being blocked, or stuck, or just life taking over and not being able to do the writing you are meant to do, can start to make us sick.

There is this May Sarton quote that brilliantly illustrates this:

“The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.”

The gift is the impulse to write. To create. That impulse is there for a reason, and it is guiding you. But when we do not do the necessary clearing of our own blocks and things lurking in the subconscious, it becomes incredibly hard to access our gift. There’s that word again: hard. Everything hardens. It’s as if the flow of life were backed up.

So what is this internal work I keep referencing?