Thursday, February 19, 2009

I feel compelled to post.

Well, my co-writer just posted a screaming fit about writing being hard... and I FULLY AGREE.
I have been considering this problem at great lengths, as to why, something as seemingness as pulling words out of your head and smushing them onto a page, should be so difficult, and I have reached a few conclusions...
Writing is, indeed, an art form.  If you dun nots so guds in teh be wazs ovs ritings uses iz nuts guds at all.  Or even if you chose simple words that look good but don't add all the right punctuation to the sentence causing the reader a very difficult time in deciphering what you have written, you aren't creating something that is easy, and in some ways, beautiful to look at.  When you write, regardless of the inlet and outlet, you have to produce something that is easy to read, easy to understand, and conveys your message, whether it be a story about a dragon, or instruction on how to repair a car.  This might seem easy, at first, but once you have slogged yourself into a deep, meaning project, it becomes quite taxing on your perspicuity.  That sentence, for example, took me about two minutes to get correct.  That one took about two seconds.  See the difference?
Writing is like painting a picture when you have nothing.  You have an idea, but first you must make the canvas, the paints, even the brush.
I admit, painting is much different then writing, but imagine if you had to create the stand of all your paints, then the paint brushes, then the canvas, then the stand for the canvas to sit on, then the water to clean the brushes, and then finally, you could paint... but if you ever ran out of a color, you had to make more....
What me and my co-author are experiencing is that part, right there.  We took the time to make the canvas, the brushes, and all the paint... but then we ran out of a few colors... so we had to stop painting, and make those colors... the only problem is, by the time we finished doing that... we forgot what we were painting... So now we start again, from the middle of the beginning.
The easy summery of why writing something like a novel, or a professional body of work, is so difficult is because you are creating an entire world... This world has rules and laws, like our own, some of which will bend and some of which will brake.  Inside this world, you have people and things, doing stuff with each other, all for different reasons, and those reasons are your story.  You have to explain why those people are, what those things are, and why those people care about those things and why those things are so important... See, it gets confusing, and difficult to remember.
I guess what I am saying in my sleep-deprived state is:
Writing is like any other art... if you look at your canvas and feel the need to vomit, or do massive amounts of drugs, then that time is not the time to be painting.  The same goes for writing... if you want to hurt yourself when you look down at that blank page of paper, then everything you write will be garbage, simply because, your mind is attempting to get away from it, to stop doing it, or simply forget about it.  And as we all know from High School... if you mind doesn't want to do it, it will find a way not too, regardless of the consequence.
Now I would like to believe that when we get published, this problem will be a bit easier to deal with, if for no other reason because I will have the gratification of saying I am now published, plus the support of all those helping me to publish my work... but for now, all I have is my dreams and delusions... and they are, unfortunately, becoming one-in-the-same.

No comments: