A friend sent me this article from the Washington Post that outlines why famous authors write. I relate a lot to what Sebastian Junger, author of the Perfect Storm wrote:
“When I write a sentence of a paragraph or a chapter that’s good, I know it, and I know people are going to read it. That knowledge — Oh my God, I’m doing it, I’m doing this thing that works — it’s just exhilarating. Lots of times I fail at it.. . . But when it’s good . . . it’s like going on a date that’s going well. There’s an electricity to the process that’s exciting and incomparable to anything else.”
(Fellow wordsmiths: Doesn’t that sum it up beautifully?)
I remember watching Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED Talk entitled, “Your Elusive Creative Genius”, where she shared that for her, writing is such hard work! I remember hearing this and nodding in agreement as she compared herself to a sweaty mule, sitting at her computer wrestling with each painstaking word.
But there are also times when you feel like you just wrote a bunch of shit and then revisit it the next day with fresh eyes and you find yourself thinking, “Damn. Did I write this? That’s some great work!”
Easy. as. pie.
