Writing is Hard

Last year, I finished a first draft. This wasn’t from scratch; some of the chapters were already done, so it was probably only about 80k words. That was a lot of work, and I’m rightfully proud of it.

In that same time, I’ve written maybe two blog posts.

Can you guess which one bothers me more?

There’s a strange feeling I get when I sit down to just let my thoughts out. They fight each other. I’d like to say they scramble through the door all at once, blocking each other in their rush to escape. But that’s not true. They’re too good at fighting each other; they kill too effectively and I’m left with nothing.

In the end, I’m left staring at a blank screen without the energy or endurance to just let it go. Oh, I had lots of ideas. Just look at them, all dead out there.

I want to share my ideas. It’s just that I want to barf them out (hell, isn’t that the reason I’m paying hosting for this blog?). But who wants to read barfed out ideas when there’s roughly 9 billion movies on Netflix right now? I have 6 unread books on my desk right now. No-one needs more thoughtvomit in their life. Not even the man writing this, in truth. So where does that leave me?

I didn’t start writing because I wanted to be read, which is its own problem but that’s for another day. I started writing because I wanted to tell stories, and nowhere is vomiting part of that.

I used to had a saying about Twitter that if I posted, it would be to announce a new post or the tweet would itself be worth reading. What does it mean to be “worth” reading?

This is the most honest I’ve been about my process in months. Is it worth anything?