Sometimes, writing is fun. Super fun. It’s those moments that are the gateway drug into a long miserable career in the arts. Sometimes the fun can become a problem.
It’s like – writing the first draft feels like this:
When you’re done, you either think it’s the most awesome, carefree work you’ve ever read or you’re like:
This, sadly, is almost certainly the reaction of the editors/ people who can give you money for your work.
Or, let’s face it, you, if you wait long enough for the glow of initial creation to die down and are able to read the draft with a critical eye.
So you have to revise. Which is when you realize your fun mud sculpture has no structure, no good place to start the revision.
It’s a long, icky, careful slog of finding where you can insert structure, how you can re-organize your thoughts, capture what was actually good and shore it up, somehow, when it was never designed to have a stable structure beneath it.
and all the while you’re doing this HARD WORK…
You could be playing in another fun first draft.
If you measure your writing in terms of ‘hours in the chair’ or ‘words written’ – either way, playing in the mud puddle is the same amount of documentable being-a-good-writer as the difficult revision. This is why it is so easy to fall into the “I never finish things” trap, because those beginnings are fun and getting them all sorted out and right isn’t.
Ultimately, you have to let go of the fun. It’s great when it happens, but you can’t rely on it, and you can’t choose it over doing the tough work. Because writing isn’t play… not if you want to do it professionally. It’s a job. You gotta work. Work when you don’t want to. When you don’t feel like it. Because it’s your job.
And then trust me, THAT becomes the mud puddle.*
*Not saying that work will become fun. I mean the stuff you called work before becomes your fun and you discover there’s a whole new layer of icky work to do under it. The cycle continues.
