Why writing is so fucking hard.

By ‘’fucking hard’’ writing I’m talking of good fictional writing, and why it has maybe the most challenging creative process.

Even though I don’t think only artist possess and act on creativity, I’m going to stick to the processes of creating art. Of course, you might view art in a broader sense, as I sometimes do.

The broader sense being: everything that involves creating something that previously wasn’t. In that sense an entrepreneur creating a new business, an engineer inventing, a scientist discovering, or a journalist writing an article with an nuanced idea, could be argued are artist in their own rights.

Though, the argument that art should have an inherent connection with an emotional response, or at least beauty, is valid; the thought of a new business evoking a strong emotional response, or being coined as beautiful, is comical. Nonetheless, few would argue that creativity isn’t one of the key components of their success, if of course they are successful.

But I digress. What I wanted to address is that I’m going to limit myself to the traditional sense of what art forms there are (literature, performing arts, media arts, visual arts), and how writers have somewhat of a bigger burden to carry in order to make art. Don’t worry I’m not going to make this long.

Writing you could argue is the least passive of all arts. Least passive for the ‘consumer’; notice, where in other arts I would use the word ‘observer’, here it would made no sense; one does not observe a book. ‘To consume’ isn’t a perfect analogy, I admit, but it comes closer to the truth. For to appreciate the beauty, and therefore art, of written words you must concentrate more than merely being an observer.

This applies not only to the consumer but also to the creator, I’ll come back to that later.

As someone who tried, with various degrees of seriousness, painting, dance, filmmaking, acting, architectural designing and writing; I got an actual taste of the creative process of each.

The thing I find to be one of the hardest aspects of writing is the lack physicality, your body is stiff, only your fingers and your eyes move, something I find surprisingly challenging. And it’s ultimately a lonesome process. Of course, some people don’t see those things as obstacles, they perhaps thrive when they’re alone and motionless.

But there is an objective thing to be said.

The easy argument is that in writing you can do anything and that the freedom cripples you, unlike in some other arts, where you have tangible limits of what’s possible, you have the natural laws holding you down. You can’t make a pirouette that last for hours, or design a building with floating walls. But that is something I feel is often addressed and is something that stands true for painting as well, the fear of a blank canvas just as the fear of a blank piece of paper.

In order to make something, you need to do. The idea that artists act on inspiration is widely misunderstood. Waiting for inspiration is the death of it, only while you work does it come. It’s as if you lay on the surf board, and just expect that you’ll surf; you need to hustle, you need to paddle to catch the wave. What does that have to do with anything? Well, in writing it’s probably the hardest to tell if you’re paddling in the right direction.

In other arts you see your moves, your brush strokes. You can see the parts slowly making the whole greater than their sum, almost at a glance. If we view it as an art form, even in architecture, which is a fairly more complicated than other arts, a master can quickly decipher a drawing as being ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But writing does not allow that; there’s no stepping back to see the bigger picture, at least not in a straight forward way. You can’t see the whole, you’re stuck in a few sentences at a time. The closest thing to that is to look at how it looks on paper and maybe get a sense of the rhythm, maybe.

That’s what I meant by earlier implying that writing is in a way less passive then other arts, even to the creator.

There’s a point to be made about performing arts. Acting and singing are depended on external pieces, the script and the lyrics, and they along with dance are fleeing arts, they don’t make a finished product, although they often are parts of one. But this is a topic for another essay.

You might notice I didn’t mention music, specifically composing. Perhaps my point about writing fiction is true in writing music, I assume it is, if the term ‘writing music’ implies anything. The thing is I know almost nothing about it so I’ll leave that to you.

So this were my two cents on why writing is difficult. My point wasn’t that writing is harder and therefore more noble, but to actually give an explanation to why it is hard.

Thanks

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