You know the moment when you are revising a story and you’ve got most of the story done, and you know it’s good – maybe even better than good – but you’ve got one section that isn’t working and you’ve read it over so many times it doesn’t make any sense?
That’s the joy and the hell of writing.
Or when you are staring at a story that was flowing up until one minute ago, but now upon re-reading is a total mess that you hate and if you could bring yourself to do it, you’d delete the entire file?
That’s the joy and hell of writing.
And there are stories that you’ve finished and when you read it (at the moment it was done) you were so satisfied with yourself. It was an unquestionable fact that you were the next Faulkner and this was a masterwork. Of course, two weeks later when you looked at it again, you realized ten percent of the words were spelled incorrectly, you used the same word five times in three paragraphs, and you accidentally called the main character Elena and her name is Ellen. You wonder if someone else has been using your computer and changing your story just to mess with you. At least, you hope that’s what happened.
Yep, the joy and the hell of writing.
But it’s also the most difficult story you can’t bring yourself to work on because it’s so hard. Somehow you find yourself finishing it and you’re relieved just to be done with the damn thing. Then a friend reads it and tells you they cried, or laughed, or that the characters or dialogue stayed with them for days.
There’s a joy that comes from living through the torture.
What do you do to get yourself to the other side when you hit the wall in your writing? How do you keep going?
Filed under: Blog post, Inspiration, Short Story, Writing | Tagged: agony, hell, joy, torture, writing | 4 Comments »
