NCWN

Writing shouldn’t be hard, right?

After all, most everyone uses language every day.  Most everyone tells a story of some kind at some point in their lives.  Most everyone writes or has written a letter, an e-mail, a note, a memo, a text message, a postcard, something.

So writing shouldn’t be hard, right?  Not like painting a portrait, or playing a musical instrument, or chipping marble into a sculpture, or practicing any of the other “fine” arts.

Writing isn’t hard.

Writing well, on the other hand . . .

Writing well is immensely difficult.  Writing well takes study, and practice, and hard labor; it takes craftsmanship, just as building a sturdy house does.  And that’s just to write well, to express yourself with clarity and force.  Writing extremely well takes all that and art, too: flashes of inspiration that can’t really be taught or summoned up, only prepared for.

Writing anything worthwhile is hard.  James Joyce once spent ten hours crafting, honing, perfecting two sentences for Ulysses.  Ernest Hemingway once told a friend that he loved having written, but he hated writing: it was too difficult, too draining, for him to truly love.  This from a man who hunted deep-sea fish for fun.  William Butler Yeats wrote entire poems, such as “Adam’s Curse” and “The Fascination of What’s Difficult,” about how hard writing a poem is.

Once a writer manages to write something worthwhile, they usually try to get it published.  Getting published, and then getting readers (the two are not the same), isn’t hard in the same way that writing is.  It’s hard in the way that winning a poker game or an NCAA tournament pool is hard.  It takes knowledge, patience, skill, and more luck than we’d like to admit.

In this space, we will be discussing the art, craft, and business of writing: the luck, the skills, the patience, the practice, and the hard work that are involved.  We’ll feature articles, columns, and testimonies from professionals and dedicated amateurs, but we also want all members’ thoughts and experiences on the struggles of writers.  We want to see some discussion and some (friendly) debate; mostly, though, we want our members to see that they’re not going through all this alone.

Let’s get to work.