Writing, for me, is an excruciatingly painful process. It can take me hours to get through a simple paragraph--days sometimes to write an entire page. It's not that I'm constantly re-writing, but simply that when I sit down to write, everything stops.
It's not that I don't have the ideas; ideas are constantly churning through my head. It's that the act of writing is very unintuitive to me. It feels false--arranging for a time and space to annotate what's in your head--and, as a result, when I sit down to do it, my head aches and my fingers twitch.
I wish there were a simpler way of getting things down--I could be one of those assholes always speaking into a tape recorder, but then I'd have to sit down and type that up, and that can't possibly feel any more natural.
Of course, I'm telling you this in writing--and words are flowing quite easily, actually. Which is another important distinction: writing throwaway thoughts are easy for me. Things that don't feel like they have a weight attached to them can be dashed off at a moments notice. But when I know someone's watching (and, I guess, in this case someone is), it becomes impossible.
An example: For eight or nine months, from November 2004 to July or so of 05, I wrote a letter to George W Bush every day. Most of those letters were documentation of an especially amazing period of my life (the birth of my son). They were fun and easy to write at the beginning. I posted them to a blog site mainly so that a few friends could read them, and so that they were accessible by myself. But then people started reading them. Hundreds of people. It became almost impossible to continue them (that the aching sleep deprivation of new parenthood had finally kicked in didn't help either). It finally got so difficult to write these funny little letters that I stopped entirely.
Now, a good friend has asked me to write one more, for a website he runs. One letter. And it's fucking impossible. I've been staring at a blinking cursor for hours now, slowly writing one sentence over and over again. It's excruciating.
Now I know what you're going to say: You publish a magazine every two months that tens of thousands of people read. And that's true. But I'm not writing the entire magazine, I'm editing it. I'm working with people for whom words come easily, and I'm helping them to choose the right ones. That's where my strengths lie.
But writing? Not so much. I swear it's going to kill me one day.
existance
That misspelling was deliberate, right?
Anyway, I've found that writers hate writing perhaps more than everyone else.
It never gets easier for the simple fact that careful thinking never gets easier. And what is good writing but careful thinking put on paper.
It's also difficult because it involves choices--dozens or even hundreds in every paragraph. Each word is a choice. And as (usually) inherently indecisive people, this pains writers greatly. Logic and methodical thinking are difficult.