A Rant about Writing

I'm currently reading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. While I'm only halfway through the book, one thing spoke out to me in the introduction. Writing is hard. We humans are constantly in thought: about what's next, the things our senses are processing, the state of the world, our opinions and so on. Yet when it comes to putting the words on paper (or a word processing software), it's hard.

I have this trouble all the time; even with things as simple as writing a journal entry that no one in the world is going to read. I sometimes stare at the page for a couple of minutes, letting the thoughts flow in my head - but never putting them on paper. Then I start thinking about all the things I need to do for the day and then snap, I realised I have a pen in my hand and a book still opened.

But then something almost magical happens less than 5 minutes later. I write. I write and write and write until a whole page is full and I'm satisfied and I'm beaming (or crying). I don't read it back right then, I don't read it back the day after. Sometimes, I don't read it back at all. I just let it out.

And I think that's kind of the key to writing. If you stare at the empty page long enough, the words will come to you. And even if it's not exactly great, it'll come to you... but only if you wait long enough and allow it to come to you.

I write for fun. And I think that's worse. I have friends who are journalists, writers, copyeditors - people who write for a living. People who have deadlines and structures and possible ideas. I don't. I don't have deadlines or structures. I don't even have a salary or advance to motivate me to write. The only thing I have is lots of possible ideas.

But I do love writing. I both love and hate it. I love that I can see my thoughts and opinions out in the open, but I hate that I have to put in the work to write. Even dictating and using one of these fancy speech-to-text applications feels like a lot.

Ironically, I am such a verbose person, yet I tend to be a little bit more reserved in my writing. Like asking people to read is much more burdensome than subjecting someone to listen to my rants.

But I know people like to read. We send texts to one another. Most of us prefer to read a message these days rather than to listen to a closed one speak. We read stuff to find out where to eat or stay. We read headlines. We use the search functions on our web browsers to find keywords on a page. Books are still going OFF! People still enjoy reading.

And for most of us, we know people like reading, and we want to be seen as "good" writers because it makes us look smart, principled, refined and educated. We want to desperately be seen as a good writer that we feed so much of our mess and thoughts into AI so that it can spit out a refined, repackaged version of our tangled web of thoughts.

But why can't we do that for ourselves? Why can't we sputter our sloppy thoughts on paper and just work our way through to be better writers? Or - a crazy thought - why can't we just let our writing be what it is? Sloppy, unstructured, raw.

Because it would suck and no one will read what I write and I'm a worthless piece of trash posing as a "writer" aaaaaaaaagh.

It's easier to throw everything into ChatGPT to synthesise, edit, make our thoughts crystal clear rather than do the work of reading, editing, opening the thesaurus to find the words that fit the context better, googling if the sentence make sense, and find - wait, what is that word for a saying that helps to illustrate what I want to say oh right - a METAPHOR.

Because when I look back at my work, I'm confronted with how bad it is. How ugly it sounds. And I hate how ugly it is. I want it to be perfect. I am a perfectionist. I want my work to be good on the first attempt. But now I have to hack at it with a figurative hammer? I need to do the work?

And I think that's the problem. That I need to do the work. I need to sit my ass down and write. But that's also the solution.

As my friend Dew M Chaiyanara said, "Just keep writing, babe. That's the only way to improve."

And I guess, stop fucking whining.