Writing is Easy

Yes, in the past couple months I have come to the conclusion that writing is easy. Stringing words together into coherent, useful sentences is a piece of cake when you've been doing it for most of your life. Storytelling, an extension of writing that involves coming up with characters and plots and making the reader care about them, is a little bit harder. It something I enjoy and have spent some time doing and I'm reasonably good at it.

Editing, on the other hand, sucks. It's really hard. You have to get nitpicky about comma placement and sentence structure. You have to evaluate whether things have been properly explained. You have to add scenes to clarify and delete scenes that are unnecessary. You have to get other people to review your work and tell you what works and what doesn't. It's a lot of hard work.

I'm on this subject because I've spent two months working on a short story for an anthology. I wrote it and was pretty happy. I was then told that my climax sucked, which I had to admit was true. I rewrote that and was told that my character didn't make sense. I spent a couple weeks trying to eke out one more scene to explain her. It started as a good story and the editing has pushed it to be better, but it's still not quite where it should be. Time for more work.

When I was younger, writing was easy. I came up with things and wrote stuff and thought it was pretty good. But until now, I've never taken the extra step towards editing. That's where writing really becomes work. It's a step well worth taking though, and my story has been polished to a neat shine. Just a few more tweaks and then I'll submit it and see what happens.

Five weeks left in summer. I'm still deciding how to make the best of it.