I love to think about writing.

I love to read about writing.

I love to read other people’s writing.

Do I love to write? Well, that’s an interesting question.

It’s like one of those difficult love affairs. It’s never smooth, and it’s never easy. But sometimes, oh, man, I’m soaring…!

Being in the writing space can be incredibly intense. Your brain is buzzing the whole time, not only making sure what you’re writing makes sense (in terms of grammar, etc.) but thinking of the best possible way to frame your thoughts. In the end, in order to put the final full stop on a paragraph, you kind of just have to walk away. You have to decide it’s finished even when you don’t feel in your heart of hearts that you’re ready to let go. You do this because of experience. Because you know that in the past, when you haven’t been able to let go of something at a time you felt it wasn’t yet ‘finished’, you kept on playing with the piece until it lost all shape and reason and became an insipid, watered down thing nobody (not even yourself) could read without cringing.

Writing is confronting. You can’t actually read it through after you’re done for the day and have a reliable idea of whether it’s any good. The days that follow sometimes don’t offer much more of an indication. It is often a good idea to ‘rest’ a piece of writing for a week or more before returning to it with fresh eyes. This is not a tidy process. While you’re thinking of how your current piece of writing is to be constructed, your thoughts drift back to the old piece, and sometimes things you ‘forgot’ pop into your head and you have to make sure you jot them down, or they will be lost forever to the archives of your mind.

Truth is, when writing, you simply cannot think of everything in one go. The best kind of writing happens when you’re struck by inspiration when words are falling onto the page, but also when you keep thinking about the writing when you are away from the page. You have to be ready to accept what comes, seemingly randomly, out of the sky and drops into your lap. You must capture whatever comes your way and then sift through it all, making decisions about what to keep, and what to chuck.

Writing is permanent. Once you put it out to the world, it belongs to everyone else. And unfortunately, if you return years later and you don’t like it any more, it’s too late to take it back. You have to live with it, like an embarrassing teenage mistake. You can’t take it back. The only choice available is to move on. Writing failures or faults, are like other failures and faults in our life. Whether they concern work, relationships, family or friends, these foibles mark the obstacles we faced and had to overcome. In the end, it’s about the continuing journey, and where each faulty step took us that will say far more about who we are than the polished perfection that is supposedly what we’re edging towards.