The Ten Reasons Why Writing is Harder Than You Think

And so it has come to this. A year that I ushered in by completing the first draft of a 550-page novel is now eight seven months before the mast and the novel only feels that much farther from being ready. That's not a whine (much as it sounds like one), as much as a completely adjusted perspective on just what an undertaking a novel really becomes when one is fully present about crafting prose instead of showing off his 100,000-words-in-a-month parlor trick.

And what an adjustment that has proved to be.

From 2000 to 2012 I wrote seven different manuscripts -- fiction and non-fiction alike -- in addition to contributing (irregularly) to this blog, revising and submitting short stories, and by the way teaching a full load at one or the other of the two colleges in my town. Those of you who write do not need to hear me say that these documents were generally pretty ragged and often downright terrible. The lesson of those quasi-lost years would seem to be that, sure, you can write a book and a third during your month-long trip to Eastern Europe... but not if you also expect anyone who isn't a blood relative or a first-circle friend to read it when you're finished.

Writing, it turns out, is friggin' *hard*. To make anything worth showing to a wider audience an author has to be completely present about every thought, every paragraph, every sentence, every word. And then after typing the signoff he or she must leave the room, and then return in a few days to tear the whole thing apart and start over. Again and again and again and again and, again. In the face of that kind of demand on one's resources the idea that I might have ever published any of the earlier crashed efforts is downright laughable.

But writing is also friggin' hard for a variety of other reasons, too: some of which are less than obvious and others of which are rarely accorded the full weight of their due. Some of which are things no one ever told me. Some of which are things I never even really considered until I went through this non-consensual transformation into the stately turtle you see before you now. And yes, your mileage may vary: writing is about talent, too, and not just perseverance, and a more talented writer may not experience everything on this list as acutely -- or at all. But this column isn't for them; it's for the rest of us: the journeymen. The folks who, like me, aren't procrastinating, aren't "blocked," aren't putting off until tomorrow what can be typed or penned today, and who still find the job of creating a worthy piece of art as seemingly elusive as ever.

These are the ten reasons why writing isn't just hard, in other words, but harder than you think:


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Layne Redmond (1952 - 2013)

It was a muggy night in early August in Asheville, North Carolina, and my friend Layne Redmond was sitting up in bed. ...Which was already cause for me to secretly hold my breath. Had she taken her evening dose of morphine? Was her eldest cat still shut out on the porch? What had we forgotten? Had I done yet another incredibly bone-headed thing and, if so, what would it be this time?

"You know, Dave," she began. Of the two times she'd started a sentence like this before, one of them had been because I'd left a pair of wet dish sponges on a painted-wood windowsill, and the other had been because I'd completely blocked the next-door neighbor's driveway. 

"You know," she repeated, "I'm really, really glad you're here."

I tried not to sigh loudly enough that she could hear me from the door.

"So am I," I said. Because I was.

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The Key Grip Completes His First "Real" Film

 

(Click the little "picture frame" icon in the lower-right corner of the view window to expand to full-size. Or follow this link to view the movie directly in youtube.)

A link to the associated Kickstarter campaign will follow as soon as the campaign itself goes live.

Cheers.

Dave O'Gorman

("The Key Grip")

Gainesville, Florida.

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It's Not How McCain Said It; It's What He *Said*

As you will no doubt be aware, last Wednesday Senator John McCain called a press conference to denounce the Obama Administration's lack of forthrightness on the subject of the Benghazi attack, at the same precise moment that the Obama Administration was briefing the senate on the subject of the Benghazi attack. At the end of the press conference the senator did not take questions, but the following morning CNN producer Ted Barrett managed to catch up with him and ask why he would express outrage over an apparent cover-up by the White House, instead of attending a meeting in which the facts as we know them were being presented by the White House.

As you will no doubt be aware, the senator's reaction was blistering and profane. McCain refused to comment about why he missed the briefing -- which was conducted by top diplomatic, military and counter-terrorism officials -- instead becoming increasingly testy when pressed to explain why he wasn’t there. “I have no comment about my schedule and I’m not going to comment on how I spend my time to the media,” McCain said. Asked why he wouldn’t comment, McCain grew agitated. “Because I have the right as a senator to have no comment and who the hell are you to tell me I can or not?” When CNN noted that McCain had missed a key meeting on a subject the senator has been intensely upset about, McCain said, “I’m upset that you keep badgering me.”

This story has been all over the political news, from mainstream outlets to amateur bloggers and back again, with withering coverage of McCain's once-again-proven inability to contain his emotions. Comment threads below the various stories about this incident have described Mr. McCain as a sore-headed old crank, and even some members of his own party have apparently wondered aloud at his judgment, with Senator Susan Collins referring to the proposed formation of a special investigative committee by noting that the existing Select Committee on Intelligence is already co-chaired by "Senator Carl Levin, who was at the White House briefing on Wednesday, and by Senator John McCain, who was not."

The admittedly unflattering narrative of this event, we are to believe, is that Mr. McCain is too short-tempered for either his own good or that of his party.  It's a fun story to see covered this way, not least because journalists are finally beginning to wonder -- albeit implicitly, at least for the most part -- what the Administration would stand to gain by misrepresenting what it knew and when it knew it regarding an attack on one of our consulates. Mostly, however, the coverage has been conspicuously confined to the emotional temperature of McCain's reply to Barrett. There's only one small problem with journalists covering the McCain outburst in this fashion, which is that is misses the point as completely as if they'd reported on a show-jumping competition instead.
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Yeah, Well, That's All I Got; Sorry.

Lately I've been thinking even more than usual about my own judgement -- at least some of which is, to put it charitably, ad hoc. I'm a paid expert on the subject of money, who hasn't had a meaningful insight into shrewd financial decision-making more than a few times in his whole life. I am profoundly, sometimes astonishingly klutzy. I take insufficient care of myself (in much the same way that there is insufficient peace in the Middle East, I suppose). I have had arguments that make very little sense.

There would've been a time when I'd have said these things with shame, or frustration, or self-loathing, but these days it feels something more like entertaining: as if I had a free subscription to a 3D sitcom in which the irregularly competent hero with the tourette's syndrome of the hands is played by someone who looks and talks and falls down a lot like I do. If nothing else, it has made for a lot of unanticipated stimuli. There's really only one major decision-making tool I've perfected, but lucky for me it's been a pretty doggone important one, too: My entire life, going back to early childhood, I've always made it a point to have a project.
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Final Predictions, Part Two

With the benefit of a couple of extra days of dust-settling (to say nothing of one last, momentous call for President Obama in the Sunshine State), the postmortem on the 2012 election has hit its stride, with some pretty interesting results: Republicans, for the most part, are in less of a de-legitimizing frame of mind than I might have predicted, and not independently the White House seems poised to flex a little bit of its post-electoral muscle. Both outcomes are worthy of a few thoughts here.
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Here's a Must-Watch, Must-Share Video

Rachel Maddow, explaining to Republicans what it will take for them to be nationally competitive in future elections and -- perhaps surprisingly -- why the rest of us are depending on it.

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