I’ve often heard writers talk about how hard writing is, but no one ever really says why.
I’m writing a memoir. I’ve been doing it for about a year now. It’s about my life and mostly my childhood. This story has been lodged in the solar plexus of my creative soul for decades. It is difficult to write. Not only are there stories that are emotionally hard for me to tell honestly, but the actual writing is hard. The putting my ass in the chair in front of Scrivener every day is difficult. The avoidance acrobatics I will put myself through in order to avoid doing the thing I most want to do. The candles I will light and the teapots I will steep and the completely unimportant text message I must urgently answer. ((THE BLOG POSTS I COMPOSE))
Right now I’m in the stage I like to call the purge. Let’s just get it all out there. Talk about it all. Write all the stories. But it feels like I’ve walked into a room of unspun cotton that isn’t yet yarn much less a comfy sweater. It’s a mess in here. At least six times a day I walk into the bathroom (because tea), look at myself in the mirror and yell “WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT?!”
And that’s the problem. I don’t know what the point is. I don’t understand the takeaway yet. I’m writing for myself and not for a reader yet. I’ve not gotten enough out yet to be able to digest what I’m actually trying to say. There are just these vignettes of a lifetime laying scattered all over desktop without any form or function.
This part is important. It actually takes a lot of work to ALLOW IT. I spent decades buying Writer’s Market books and Writers Manuals and Memoir guides and etc etc etc. But the writing part, the getting out of the way and just WRITING is the work. Or at least the first and most important part of the work. You can’t do anything unless you actually start. When I had my first child and asked a friend farther along in the parenting journey if it got any easier, he looked at me and said, “It never gets any easier. It just get differently difficult.” I suppose that is what writing a book is like. There will be different periods of difficulty down the line, but I’m in this one now.
The thing I’m waiting for is the CLICK. After producing and directing for 20 years, I know what this is. I’m lucky that way. It’s the moment where you look at a script or a show rundown or a bunch of beats thumbtacked on a wall into an act structure and something CLICKS.
I can’t explain how it happens, just that it does. You’ve gotten so intimate with the material and the structure and the objectives, that it all makes sense. CLICK.
If you need me I’ll be in this chair indefinitely, listening for the click.