The Work

The Man gave me a great compliment a while back. I had my pretty plot map spread out all over our living room floor and I was talking about moving scenes and rewriting and plotting, and he grinned. He said, “This is the work. You’re doing the part a lot of writers don’t do.”

He can still make my heart flutter.

Seth Godin blogged today about the “hard part”–the pieces of your project that are your least favorite. Every project has some. It’s not just the stuff that’s difficult to do–it’s the stuff that’s difficult or challenging or odious for you to do.

Writing has a lot of hard parts. It’s not all peppermint puppies, as Chuck Wendig reminds us. It’s agonizing. You write, you rewrite, you plot, you edit, you revise, you write some more, you tweak, you edit, you revise…. and on and on. And when you think you’re done, you put your work out there for other people to tear apart. Whether it’s your critique group, agents, editors, or the public, you set your baby on the altar of opinion and wait for someone to rip its heart out. (Gross metaphor, but don’t you think it works?)

Some folks I know don’t like the actual writing part. To me, that’s what makes my heart do little flip flops. I love the writing. I even sort of like the rewriting and revising and editing.

I think a lot of writers stall when the work rears its ugly head. Chitchatting with characters and creating scenes and playing with prose is fun for most of us. When the work of plotting and revising and editing and implementing structure comes up, we find it easy to get distracted by shiny things and leave our unfinished manuscripts languishing.

Don’t shun the work. It’s the hard part, and you’ll agonize and tear your hair out in clumps, but when it’s done, you’ll see that it’s worth it. “Ravenmarked” is a much better book than it was three months ago or six months ago or eight months ago when I finished my first draft. The work is worth it.

What’s the hard part of writing for you?