Writing is Work; Work is Dreadful · 4:59am Jun 22nd, 2018
Why is it that, before writing our tales, absolute dread settles itself on the tips of our fingers?
Writers are supposed to write—kinda the rules of a game. A person who does not write is a person who does not write, but a person who does write, because they partake in the activity of writing, are now deemed, for the sake of a pronoun, a writer.
This is supposed to be our special talent, bro. Maybe, if you're less pretentious, writing isn't at all that hard—you write on the thickness of your inspiration, word after word, until the damn page is filled, and your story nears completion.
I already wrote a story about how writing can equate to self-worth, so we'll escape that argument for the moment, and instead, tackle a different aspect of it. Since writing to writers is an innately dreadful thing to approach, why are we filled with dread at the prospect of the thing we're supposed to love?
I imagine it to be like work. Job or career, the dream and so on. Everybody, in the first day or week, is excited at the prospect to be a working person, to be useful, needed, and god forbid, your competence appreciated. Everything is fine and dandy in the working world, the place you're glad to have graced.
Writing is much the same way. Holy shit! Stories are coming out of these words, fantasies played out in prose, discussions among the imaginary that won't have them sent to an intuition. It's an escape, release, and some other third thing to us lonely fucks.
But shit changes. Work becomes, well, work—you have to wake up, do some things to look presentable, leave your home, walk or get in a car, bus, or bike, traveling away from home to someplace that will be like a second kind of home—it's just harder to live in.
You show up, hopefully looking presentable, and then you do your shit, which has become slightly less exciting, and the dues and duties of your work take their toll on your body and your soul. Soon, you dread the work of the next day, of the repeating monotony, dreaming constantly of respite.
Some days, you wake up and wonder why—a favorite of the great Skirts. Exhaustion and dread greet you on your waking routine, that, or your scrambling to get out of the house and make it to work alive and on time. No matter what, you don't think you can do it, that you can survive that place, to last those required hours—something will take you, something will kill you.
It's hard at first, but once you make it to work, your body adjusts to its strains and stresses. You're sore. You're always sore. It isn't something new. At first, it was something new, but then you adapted and became stronger, and now you can work while being weak and strong all at the same time.
I'm losing the point now, aren't I? Let's cut my rambles short and get to it.
Writing is work. It's work to writer's who view it as work, whether they want to or now, whether it's a choice or not. If writing is work to you, then at first, it was fun, fantastic work, something you could do for hours as your soul emptied onto the pages.
Like most work, writing became actual work—at least in concept. Sure, you could say that the research, reading and writing, drafting and tossing, thinking and outline are all required to write anything of quality, or perhaps, anything at all. Those are certainly components of the main bulk of work, and their strain is duly noted, but let's stick to our perceptions since that's where most problems begin.
So writing is work, at least the very idea of it, and like most work, we'd rather call in sick than leave comfort behind. Work is dread, or rather, the idea of work is dreadful. The idea of writing, that words must escape me, that sentences must be structure—I must work to create words, and that idea, in of itself, is enough to create dread.
But it gets easier. We get stronger. Not through repetition, though it plays its part, but by partaking in the activity in of itself. I'm supposed to be writing a story instead of composing this blog, but I was filled with dread, and wondering why, shifted gears. I didn't even do it for the sake of the blog: I just wanted to get my gears going.
Countless times, I did not think I would live, that if I went to the gym, my body would fall apart; if I went to work, I would collapse on the floor of the building meant to show ovens and Hell itself what was up. But when I get to work, when I start lifting the weights at the gym, my dread fades, like a distant memory, while the task my body remember, the duty I set upon myself begins once again.
And that's the way it's supposed to be. You stop dreading things once you do them, and once you start doing them, you wondered why you dreaded them in the first place. The answer is easy and you shouldn't consider yourself a fool: writing is work, and work is dreadful.
At least the idea of it.
Anyhow. The words are pouring through me now, long-winded and not of much sense, but these are the best words I can compose at the present moment, at my present skill and present state of mind, though I hope my future prose will be half of what Skirts posses.
That, and fuck that AiD's guy.
Peace.
I know how you feel...
Maybe this is why I write only a handful of things a year. Writing isn't the hard part, it's sitting down and getting started.
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Pro-tip from an amateur: just write. Anything. Just words on the page, in no particular order, a strange thought or shitty sensation, whatever it takes to get the engine going.
Once it's started, you start writing the words you're supposed to be writing, and if you get lucky, they'll feel like the right words. They'll come and they'll go, and during their composition, you'll wonder why they were so hard to begin in the first place.
Also, fuck that jake guy.
This succinctly describes my last 2-3 years of procrastination, hopefully TheNextGamer doesn't kill me this time.