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In my experience writing, there is a nebulous thing inside your head that you want to express, and then there is the stuff you have put down on paper for the rest of world to see. And there is often an acute awareness that there is a pretty large gulf between the two. And that’s somewhere between uncomfortable and painful.

I always assumed that people describing their personal dissatisfaction with writing are describing this effect. I think the fact that these people keep writing despite that, speaks to their love of writing.

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With respect: This is annoying. It's great that writing is breezy and purely joyful for you, but I promise you that for many of us whose jobs in some way involve writing, our struggles with process are not an affectation.

I grant you that "i hate writing!" Twitter shit is annoying too, but all Twitter shit is annoying. It's more accurate to say that my relationship with writing is deeply ambivalent. I love many parts about writing, but I also feel a continual, gnawing frustration at my own limitations. Sometimes it really is just miserable for me-- but sometimes, when it works, it delivers a satisfaction I can get nowhere else. That's why I keep pursuing it, haltingly: Not because it's painless, but because it feels somehow necessary despite the pain.

I don't really know why it feels necessary. I've often thought that it'd be wise to try hard to divest myself of the desire for writing altogether, given that my natural talents don't seem to lie in that area (or at least given that it really is a struggle for me to do it). But that's also depressing and feels like giving up on something meaningful. (Plus, it's hard to change careers, etc.)

"But nobody not in the profession weeps any tears about how hard of a job writing is, nor should they." Eh, not true. I've often heard non-writer friends express similar feelings when they're thrust into the position of needing to write for public consumption (that is, ambivalence: excitement at writing but also discomfort and anxiety). And there are also many writing-intensive jobs in which the point is not the prose per se, but communication -- many straight news journo jobs fall in this category.

It's just really not the same as knitting or snowboarding or whatever, because those things aren't key to *being human* in the way that communication and expression of thought and feeling are. I think a better comparison would be to something like cardio exercise, which is very hard for many people but also feels painfully necessary. I, personally, find running to be freeing and easy and fun -- something I can do without thinking too much about, something that's good and good for me. I am grateful that I lucked into a body that allows me to do that. But I don't think that people who have a hard time running but keep pursuing it are, like, affecting their struggles.

tldr: Whining about writing is annoying bc all whining is annoying, but the feelings of struggle are real and legit and I'd ask you kindly to not dismiss them. OK, now I'm going to go back to trying to write the bullshit thing I've been putting off for the last hour.

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I like how you flexed the writing chops in the first part of this post before getting to the primary argument.

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I understand what these people mean, I think. I write fiction, just for fun, just for myself for now, but I write. And I do not love the process of writing.

It is hard for me, primarily because I can't get into a 'flow state' while I'm doing it, ever. Almost every single sentence of any complexity takes minutes to arrange, and the arranging of complex sentences into a paragraph, depending on the difficulty of the idea I'm trying to communicate, can take even longer.

I love playing with words. I love using language in ways I never would while speaking or thinking. That's why I write. But it feels more like a logic puzzle to me than a fun activity, and most of the satisfaction comes from completing the puzzle, having finally put the sentence down on the page just the way I want. And it is in that sense that I enjoy "having written" more than I enjoy "writing".

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I don't know, man. The "lol I hate writing I have impostor syndrome" brand of self-deprecation is obnoxious (a lot of it sounds like "look, what I do is really hard, please admire me"), but there's a core truth there that applies to a lot of writers, myself included. Personally, I'm envious of writers like you, who seem unstoppably prolific and never have writer's block — but that's unfathomable to me. For me, to write is to do battle with a vicious perfectionism that tears my words to shreds faster than I can type them, and in 10 years of writing seriously, I have yet to find a way to make it enjoyable. The reason I don't quit — and the reason I've always liked that Dorothy Parker quote — is that, when I'm done, I find I usually like what I've written even if I hated every single word as I wrote it.

I know writers who are like me, and I know writers who find nothing but joy in the process. I often wonder if there's some flaw in my approach that is making this more miserable for me than it needs to be, but I suspect our brains are just wired differently.

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May 3, 2023Liked by Freddie deBoer

Wow, Freddie. Those first two paragraphs are among the most beautiful you have ever written. Truly. I have a 3-year old and I am finely attuned to her, and I think she would agree with every word. If you can forgive the presumptuous opinion, I think that if you ever want to write a book-length memoir, you already have the first two paragraphs. Now just keep going... Thank you!

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Harlan Ellison said that writers spent their youth reading. It's not possible to turn out to be a good writer without being immersed in the world of books.

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I don't necessarily disagree with the points you're making, especially the ones regarding writing culture, but I still need to ask: have you considered the possibility that you're just very fortunate in a way that makes your writing experience atypical?

I think you're truly fortunate to enjoy the process of writing, but there are other reasons to write. Sometimes you write because there's something that just needs to be said, and if you don't do it then no one else will. For the last twelve years I've been writing a novel. It's a story I truly believe in telling, but after all this time and countless discarded drafts it's still not complete. It is actually approaching completion, but every step to get here has been a battle, a massive struggle plagued with procrastination and writer's block aplenty. It is very much a case of "hate the writing, love having written."

But I've also seen the other side. Less than two weeks ago I set out to start a blog, and although I have only finished one blog post, I've been writing 1-2K words a day since then. I have created a backlog of half- or mostly-finished posts that should allow me to publish consistently over the next few weeks. There aren't even any tangible results yet, but I'm absolutely loving it just for the act of writing. I've put to words ideas that have been simmering in my head unshared for years.

I'm not even totally sure what the difference is. Maybe I've just improved as a writer, or maybe it's just that the stakes feel lower. Maybe I'll feel different when/if I get a large audience for my writing. All I know is that as someone who's experienced a little bit of both sides, it's hard for me to judge the people who build a culture around the struggle of writing.

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I don't know what kind of weird hobbyists you know Freddy. I know lots of people who love gardening, knitting, etc, but have trouble finding motivation to do it and don't get as much done as they want to. There are certain activities which are fun, but require an expenditure of willpower to get started. Some people, for some reason, have trouble getting enough willpower together for that expenditure, so they procrastinate on something they know will bring them joy.

There are also activities which are fun on the net, but you have to occasionally go through a dull patch to get to the fun stuff. People may have trouble finding motivation to do that. To use writing as an example, an author might have a wonderful time writing two different scenes, but find it devilishly hard to write a scene that links them together.

I do not write professionally, but I do it for fun, and I find myself procrastinating. I even procrastinate for more basic things, like watching a movie with a complicated storyline that takes effort to understand, or reading a fascinating book. It is one of the great perversities of the human nervous system that it is possible to genuinely love something and still be unmotivated to do it.

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A couple thoughts. Freddie, your first three paragraphs are beautiful, evocative and the exact kind of thing that makes me jealous of your talent as a writer. They're so lovely, I wish they belonged to a different essay. To a memoir or a deeper meditation.

That is not meant to be a critique of the rest of the post, which I agree with. Only to say that this is too fine an appetizer for the main course.

As for the writer's block memes and the insincerity of it all, I agree. I suppose when I have writer's block it's almost always because I am in a bad place emotionally, or under such stress that I am close to a nervous breakdown, where my mind simply can't order itself enough to focus on writing. Those are unpleasant times, not really times I enjoy talking about let alone joking about. That kind of struggle is generally something outside of the act of writing that has simply infiltrated my ability to do life in general. Writer's block is a side-effect. In those moments I suppose ditch-digging would be easier, but not preferable (I have ditch-digger's block most of the time).

In any case, good stuff. As per usual.

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Some non-writers asked the other day how I got to be a writer and all I could come up with was “I got a taste of real work early on and got the fuck out.”

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I write because I love it. When I don't write, I feel terrible, like not exercising, or not eating right. Sometimes I write garbage, but I'm still glad I've written. Most of the time I make progress in longer, more complex things that seem at times like sandcastles staring down a high tide. Often after I've worked on these pieces for days and days, something crystalizes, and I realize what to cut and what to connect and what new direction to take. It's the greatest feeling in the world. I love when people connect with something I wrote. I love when they tell me it's a new perspective they hadn't considered before. I especially love it because I went into writing with a question, not a perspective, and so whatever I discovered is what I'm sharing, and it's not some pre-packaged idea-nugget wrapped in "writing skills," but the articulation of ideas that feel important to me. I love writing, and I can't not write. In the vast sea of human experience, I have no doubt there are some who consider themselves writers yet struggle to write and complain about it as a form of social bonding. But I also know that people have been (well) trained by social media to speak in "the language of grievance," and that we mimic those we consider our "tribe" all too well. So I share your skepticism. (And I enjoyed writing this.) :D

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When my daughter was going through university, I was astonished as she and her friends constantly complained about burn-out, stress, anxiety, putting themselves through “hell,” etc. No one seemed to actually enjoy being in university. I think this relates to what you are saying in this piece, and what you have referenced in other pieces about the self-defeating nature of “ironic distance.”

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One thing I find real funny is when these writers point to someone like George R. R. Martin having "writers block" and think it's relatable. The number of people alive or who have ever lived that have written more words than him is a rounding error away from 0. But yeah, super relatable.

It's even funnier when someone like Stephen King talks about writer's block.... he's just fucking with people right?

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As one of those many many people who think about writing, but don’t, I think you underestimate the fear of criticism that many people have. You are an amazing and brilliant writer, but you also have overcome your inhibition and embrace your willingness to share ideas, even though they can, and often are criticized. Maybe it’s the fear that these writers are expressing? (Obviously people who keep unpublished diaries are also “writers”, but they don’t have an audience).

Thank you for a thoughtful piece.

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This is something that always kills me about groups of writers. The strange pose of liking writing less than everyone else.

Writing is a stupid thing to do for a whole bunch of reasons and has got to be one of the easiest things *not* to do.

I even wrote about this exact topic almost exactly a year ago: https://radicaledward.substack.com/p/why-do-writers-hate-writing

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