Writing is Hard Work

There is this popular misconception that writing makes you feel better. In fact, many people ask you to write it out. But for me at least, writing is hard work. Writing is no therapy. Being able to write may mean that you are ready to open up, perhaps it may be a sign of progress, but it in itself doesn’t promote progress. You do not get better because you write. You feel better because it may show you the progress you have made regarding something. There is a difference.

I write about the past. About people, process, its sights, sounds and smells. I write when I mourn them when I think of all the ways that could have made it better.

It is particularly the ending that makes writing hard. Knowing where to conclude is hard. That is a different story altogether. There is nothing more devastating than finishing a piece of work after you’ve put your heart and soul into it because, by the time you’ve finished writing this, you’ve fallen in love with the process. Your joy is now going through what you’ve written, finding sentences you can polish, paragraphs you could cut down to make room for others.

You know when this is about to end. You start becoming satisfied with what you’ve done. You take a minute to enjoy what you have done in all these days. It is this minute of paramount joy, that people speak about. At that point, you know it’s over. You could take all the time in the world to go through the work, but you find it to be astonishingly perfect. You cannot seem to find a flaw in something that tells a tale about the flawed person writing this. This is the moment of truth when your work stops being yours. Now, this a the property of a community that shall read, comment, praise, & criticize it. It’s no longer yours. It’s a story of heartbreak that would perhaps make its way into something you write later on.