I’ve found that one of the hardest things to explain about writing is why it is that, sometimes, things come so easily that they seem almost magically obvious when, other times, they are so difficult that they appear maddeningly impossible.
I’ve been writing for years and years. For the past fifteen or so, it’s been a part of my day to day work, meaning that some part of my paycheck is for putting words together. Sometimes the words come easy and the people around me don’t seem to notice that there was any sort of effort involved . . . because, I suppose, in truth, there wasn’t.
And then other times, the things that everyone (including, I suppose, me) should be easy just take forever to write. And there’s no way to explain why one thing takes longer to write than another.
This can be problematic when your job includes writing. Most of the time, you do the best you can in the time you have. Most of the time it works as well as it needs to. If words are what you use on a day to day basis, you can usually get them to do what you want. And it had better be that way, because the deadlines are usually pretty firm. Commitments are made, proposals are due, opportunities only last so long. You make it work.
There’s a little more leeway in the writing that I do for myself — at least, there used to be. Somehow I’ve gone from being someone who is perfectly comfortable wandering through something and letting it take as long as it needs to, to becoming someone who expects to get it done and to get it done well.
Writing, as I said above, doesn’t always work that way.
One chapter might come easily within a matter of minutes, a quick acceleration through the story with the wind in your hair. And then the first paragraph of the next chapter can take days looking for the road . . . and once you find it, it’s a grade so steep that you have to downshift and listen to your tires slip on the gravel, hoping you won’t start sliding backwards.
Case in point, the Undertaker Story. By all rights, it should have been a quick rewrite of something I did fifteen years ago. My first read of it was pretty clean. But as I started to work through things, it became obvious that there was more story there than what I had told way back when.
Fine, I told myself, all the better. How hard can it be? Just a few more layers of depth here and there, a few extra days of writing. Then I can check it off and move on to the next project. I thought this story would be done a month ago, two weeks ago, three days ago.
I wrote a fair amount today, grinding my gears. Yesterday had been a long haul as well, barely any progress forward in the story despite a lot of effort.
And the day before that? I made a turkey.
But I’m still working on the story.