Writing Is Hard… And How To Make It Easier
Before you read any further, stop for a minute and try to think of five ways that writing is hard. Got it? Go!
Four out of those five (or maybe all five) have to with you, don’t they?
What makes writing hard isn’t usually the act of writing. After all, we write all the time. We type out emails, jot notes, journal, and send texts and social media messages daily. Most of the time, those feats of writing don’t feel very hard.
Then, we sit down to write. And, suddenly, writing is hard.
Writer’s block. Creative burnout. A muse that’s fled. Too many ideas to settle on one. Unfinished drafts that get stuck in the drawer in favor of the new project. No time to write. Too many distractions. Fear that no one will read it. Worry that no one will like it. Marketing eats up our writing time. Imposter syndrome burns a hole through your soul.
We’ve all been there.
But, no pain, no gain, right? If it’s not hard, we must be doing something wrong as we stare at the blank page for the next scene or try to come up with a pithy way to make the next point in our essay or article. We struggle through, complain to writing friends, and wait for the next moment where things seem to align and writing is easy and fun for a while.
What Makes Writing Hard
Writing is hard because we’re humans. We get in our own way. We let our brains run wild and create pathways that aren’t really all that helpful. We continue to believe in doing things in ways that actually don’t benefit us very much. Our emotions and feelings and thoughts get all wound up in the tasks. We believe that writing is hard. We believe that writing has to be hard in order for it to be good or worthwhile.
Writing is hard because we make it hard.
Bit of a brutal truth, eh?
The reality is that we become so conditioned to the notion that writing has to be hard (or that marketing your books has to be hard or that working as a writer has to be hard) that we unintentionally make choices and choose pathways that reinforce that belief. Our brains are funny that way.
That’s not to say that there aren’t really difficult things that happen in our writing lives, because there are. Publishers shut down. Rejections happen. Things in our personal or professional lives can impact how we feel or even our physical ability to write. But, even these situations can often create new opportunities and insights, if we let them.
Make Writing Easier
What are the magic keys to making writing easier?
Believe in Easy Writing
Yup, that’s right. The first step is to take the leap and believe that writing doesn’t have to this hard, arduous thing that beats and batters you. Believe that writing can be easy and your brain is going to start looking for the opportunities to make it easy.
Will this happen overnight like tiny woodland creatures have visited your brain? No. It’s a journey. But even one easier step on that writing journey can make a difference.
I regularly do blog writing for a freelance client. There are times when I look at the outlines and I can feel my body settle into an acknowledgment that this is going to be a long, hard afternoon of writing that won’t be fun. With the help of the PQ for Writers program, I started to challenge myself to find one thing that would make the writing easier and go faster. I noticed that if I broke everything down into sections and gave myself ten minutes per section, I wrote a little faster and the blog felt easier to write. I also discovered that when I let myself have a little euchre break as a reward for finishing a section or two, I wrote even faster — partially because that euchre hand goes by quick and then I’d be ready to jump back in. I cut my writing time on the blogs by a 1/3, without compromising quality.
Super simple changes, right? And looking back, they seem so obvious. But, because my brain was caught in this “ugh, I have to write these blogs this afternoon and it’s going to be long and boring,” I didn’t spot the ways that I could make writing easier.
Now, your tricks will be different. I use different ones from fiction to nonfiction, from book writing to blogs. But, if you open yourself up to those possibilities, you’ll find some.
Try it: What’s hard in your writing life today? What’s one thing you can do to make it easier?
Find the Underlying Writing Saboteurs
We tend to think that things that writer’s block and procrastination and not having enough time and…. are the problems. We think that if we figure those problems out, we’ll write more or write faster or write better. Right?
The problem is that all of those things aren’t really the problem. They are the symptoms of the problem. They are symptoms of the saboteurs that we’ve got running around in our brains and emotions. And, likely those saboteurs aren’t just in our writing lives, they are all through our lives, which makes them difficult to spot and difficult to solve. The other challenge with them is that these patterns and emotions and beliefs have probably served us well at different points in our lives and we we keep using them, not really understanding how they are also damaging our efforts and making our writing life harder than it has to be.
Tackling those underlying writing saboteur patterns is a bit like getting a new keyboard after using a keyboard that sticks. The keyboard still works and it seems easier to keep using it because it’s there and you’re getting some writing done. Maybe you even have some attachment to that sticky keyboard because you wrote your first novel or book on it. Even though it’s really slowing you down and altering your writing because of those sticky keys.
Maybe one of your writing saboteurs, like mine, is a brain that is caught in a hyper-achiever mode. You think that you need to do more and more and more to accomplish your goal and you fear failing and not having people like your writing or thinking it’s good enough. And so you push and nothing ever quite quiets that fear, doubt, and anxiety. And, that, in turn fuels the imposter syndrome and writer’s block and procrastination.
The reality is that we can put band-aids on the writing issues like procrastination and writer’s block and they might hold for a while. These patterns are also rooted in negative emotions like fear, doubt, anxiety, worry, etc. But, making changes in the underlying pattern helps to treat and cure the issues so that they happen less often and less intensely. It also increases your positive emotions like creativity, innovation, joy, passion, and curiosity, which give you more energy and capacity. They help make writing easier and more enjoyable.
Find the Writing Difference Makers
For most of us, 20 percent of our efforts will have 80 percent of the results (or some suggest it’s really 1 percent of effort gives 50 percent of the results). This also happens with our writing lives. It can be so easy to fill them up with activities, tasks, and work because that’s often what we’ve been told to do. Hustle equals success, right?
Except that when we do that, most of our work and activities probably isn’t yielding the most benefit. Think of all the marketing advice and to-dos that permeate the writing world. Or think about all the things that go into writing an article or a book or whatever it is that you’re working on.
You need to do all of those things for it to be good or successful, right?
Probably not. Probably 20 percent of your effects are really giving you 80 percent of your results.
You can start slow here, too, if it helps. Look for the pieces that you’re doing that make the most difference. If it’s something you can track (and that’s interesting to you), see what the numbers show. Experiment with doing a little less and see how it impacts things overall. See if you can cut back or eliminate the things that you don’t like doing.
You may not always be able to abandon the the 80 percent, but you may be able to make them a smaller piece overall, which can make your writing life a little easer. For example, I often hear from writers that they dislike marketing. My question back is usually, “What are one or two marketing opportunities or tasks that you like doing?” or “How can you reframe those activities that are working so that it’s more fun or more meaningful to you?” The answers are different for everyone, but the benefits tend to be the same.
Sometimes abandoning that social media platform that you hate but are on because everyone says you have to be is the best choice you can make (and if you hate it, you’re likely not using it to it’s full advantage anyway.) Find what you love and that’s producing results and double down on it with new ideas or enthusiasm.
From Writing Is Hard to Writing is Easy
You may be surprised at how much even small changes in your writing life will improve how you feel about it and your results. Finding more flow, creativity, fun, and ease not only make the journey better, but they will probably get you to your writing destination faster.
