Monday 28 March 2011

In one of those curious writing

coincidences someone in my small knitting group suggested to me yesterday that I must find writing "easy". I then came home to find that Nicola Morgan was talking about "does it get easier" over on her blog. The link is here http://helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com/2011/03/does-it-get-easier.html if you want to read it. Apparently I am supposed to find writing "easy" because I write a blog post each morning and I occasionally write letters to newspapers. "You just sit down and write, don't you?" "I think about what I am going to write." "Yes but then you just sit down and write it don't you?" "No, I don't." By then I had the rest of the group listening as well. They wanted to know "how" I did it. The answer had to be "I do not know but it is not easy". "But those letters you write. You don't spend a lot of time on them do you?" "No." "Then it has to be easy for you." "No, really it is not easy. I think about them before I write them. Sometimes they are things I have thought about for years. It is just that they have come up in the media now." "But you can't know what they are going to write about!" "No but some things come up over and over again in different ways." They do agree with that but I can see they do not believe me over the issue of writing about it. As for the blog posts...how do I find something to write about each day? Do I ever get stuck for something to say? Why do I do it? I have to tell them "I do not know." "Well if you had to choose between knitting something and writing something what would you choose?" I tell them "writing something". "Well there you are then. Writing has to be easy for you." Oh no it is not. I have never gone for the "easy" option. Writing is difficult. It is probably the hardest thing I have ever done.

2 comments:

widdershins said...

"What do you do?"
"I'm a writer."
"Yes, but what do you do?"
"I write."
Yes, but what do you do?"

At that point I gave up.

catdownunder said...

Oh I love that. It is so true. Writing is not considered to be work of course!