How to Make Writing Pleasant and Easy

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Ha. I tricked you.If anyone tells you that writing is pleasant or easy, he or she is either lying or not a good writer. The fact is, writing is tough. Even for the pros. Keep that in mind as you struggle through your latest project: every decent writer goes through much the same frustration.

Case in point: I’m about to resort a boring cliche that I really know better than to use. But writing is so hard, I can’t come up with anything better. I’ve spent 20 minutes pacing around my apartment trying to come up with just the right, non-cliche, phrase to make my point. Nothing’s coming. So, in the interest of moving on, I’ve decided to cut my losses and go with the cliche, painful as it is. Here goes:

Writing ain’t easy. But, then, nothing worthwhile ever is, right?

Geez. Do you see what I mean? It took me 20 minutes to finally decide to write a silly sentence that you’ve probably heard a thousand times before (except with “writing” replaced by any other gerund). I just hope you take my cliche to heart, even though it is overused and boring.

To do good writing, you have to struggle. That’s just all there is to it. You have to think harder than you probably really want to, and that’s no fun. And the really frustrating part is that — because most people don’t write well and therefore tend to think that writing is much easier than it is — great writing often goes unrecognized and unappreciated.

So, despite my cliche, good writing is not necessarily worthwhile from a financial stand point. But it is always worthwhile from an intellectual, even spiritual, point of view.

The pleasure of good writing comes well after it’s done, when what you’ve said strikes a nerve in one of your readers. The trouble is, you often never hear when this happens. So, it’s usually easy to conclude that all of your frustrating effort has been for nothing. I’m not sure how to help with that, except to point out that it’s society’s problem, not yours.

If your writing is good, it’s in tune to the truth. And that means it is eternally worthwhile. Remembering that is the best way I know to make writing pleasant (at least to some extent). I’m sorry. I don’t know of a way to make it easy.