100

Day 44

This is my 100th blog entry, so I thought it appropriate to share some thoughts I wrote . . . on writing.

Word Wrestling – 16 September 06

        Writing is not easy for me. It’s hard work. More often than not, I find the process frustrating.  It usually goes something like this: I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with a half-baked idea – it’s getting crusty around the edges, but it’s still a little raw inside. There’s a great (even brilliant, I think) first line and a snazzy ending. The middle part needs some work, but I fall back asleep certain that everything will be sorted out in my brain by the time I crawl out of bed.

      Of course, it rarely is. In the morning when I sit yawning at my computer, that brilliant first line isn’t quite so shiny, the finale is shabby rather than snazzy, and the muddled middle sits and stares up at me unsympathetically with all the Times New Roman indifference it can muster. I can’t hit the delete key quickly enough. Sometimes, I only type a dozen words before realizing the futility of the effort. Other times I’ll trudge along through a paragraph or two or three, hoping with each keystroke that it’ll somehow get better, that I’ll somehow be able to salvage the mass of banality I’ve created. In either case, the end result is the same: a blank screen.

      Are there people out there for whom writing comes easily? Are there wielders of words whose essays and poems and stories always hit the target, who never face writer’s block or need a thesaurus, whose thoughts spill from mind to pen to paper in an uninterrupted flow of wit and wisdom? Or are they all like me, a word wrestler who goes to battle with grammar and semantics, challenging amorphous thoughts to become coherent and yes, even beautiful, to the world outside my head?

      I often, too often, come out on the losing end of the fight, with the score reading: Pristine Page – 1, So-Called Writer – 0. Yet, in spite of the disappointments, I can’t help myself – I keep coming back for more. Because on those rare occasions when I do emerge victorious, when oft-unsubmissive syllables and sentences stand in perfect order, when words become a backdrop for my ideas and not a distraction from them, I delight in language. I delight in its Creator. I delight in the joys of written communication. I delight in the gift of being able to share thoughts that cause people to ponder, to laugh, or to cry.

      And because there are such delights, I wrestle on.