Subscribe On Writing
posted in life by jon on 2005-08-17
I'm a big fan of author and hacker Paul Graham. Having recently read his essay on writing, I've been doing some thinking of my own about writing: specifically, how to do it and why. It seems obvious that since I bother keeping this blog I must like to write..but it isn't so.
Or at least it isn't completely so. love the idea of writing; of being able to communicate thoughts across the void and make someone else think like me. It's almost magic. I also love the idea of being a writer; the romance of it. Trading purely on ideas, separate from the physical world. The truth is though, writing is very, very hard. Hard to make the words go on the page, hard to stomach it when you read them afterword. In your head, your ideas have the luxury of remaining nebulous and half-formed, hiding away from the harsh light of day. Once committed to paper however (or screen in this case), they become real and must stand or fall on their own merit. That's a scary thing. I've read interviews with authors who said that writing was hard...but I never believed them because they made it look easy. Only later did I realize that this ability to write without effort was paradoxiacally the result of very hard work..and is precisely what allowed them to rise above their peers and get published.Partially because of the effort it requres, writing requires overcoming a big chunk of inertia to get started. Often I'll think of something I want to write only to be daunted when confronted by a blinking cursor and all that white screen.
Then why do it? Well...partially for the glory, as I alluded to before. But partially because writing is a good thing, and something I'm good at (not great perhaps..but not bad either), and I want to be better if I can. I enjoy working in IT, but writing has a purity that engineering lacks. Maybe it's because writing has fewer prerequisites: take away all the computers tommorrow and I'm dead in the water as an engineer, but you'd have to kill me to stop me from writing. They're something reassuring about that.
One of the hardest things for me is to read my own writing. I always feel like an idiot when looking back on something I wrote, inevitably comparing myself to writers I love..despairing over every mistake. Since part of becoming a good writer is writing alot, and re-reading and editing what you've written, writing is very often a humbling experiencee. Even worse, the same iniertia that applies to writing the initial draft applies doubly to edits. Even the stuff that seemed intelligent when you wrote it initially seems like unimaginable drivel when reading it later; and you have to fix it. It's hard...and often I never do it. I'm resolving to myself that this piece will be different. I'll come back at some later date, and shine and polish, cut out the un-necessities, and turn it into something worthy of someone reading. Someday.
