The Hellish Origins of Heavenly Writing
Good writing seems, but never is, effortless
May I share a dirty little secret? Good writing misleads. It’s crafted to go down easy, so it appears effortless. But this is pure deception: stuff worth reading is invariably hard-won.
Understanding this liberated me to become an author. Take it from me — someone long deceived and oppressed by the writer’s sleight-of-hand. The truth set me free.
It can free you, too.
For forty years, I assumed that real writers think beautifully. It certainly appeared so. My own thinking, by contrast, was a mess. I’d sit at the computer and struggle to compose my thoughts. I’d wait for ideas to flow out of me, crisply formed and perfectly arranged: you know, the way they do for other people.
They never did.
Instead, the unruly bastards would fight for my attention. They’d swarm into mind, shove one another aside, and clamor to be next in line. Then they’d limp onto the page and sit there, ugly and deformed. I’d stare at the nasty little buggers, hating them.
And hating myself.
Crises of confidence, spirals of self-doubt, writer’s block: I’ve experienced them all. All because I had unreal expectations about the craft of writing — expectations forged by the master illusionists we call writers.
Here’s the truth: at their keyboards, out of sight, skilled writers shed blood, sweat, and tears. They think murky thoughts. They draft and despair. They compose and cringe, qualify and quail. They rehash, rephrase, and recoil.
Then they do the real work of writing. They pluck out the thoughts that are beyond redemption and partially clarify the remainder. They mix and pour, boil and infuse, condense and distill. They winnow like crazy. They purify, purify, and purify again. And only then, after strenuous effort, do they get limpid pools.
Skilled writers manufacture the impression of lucidity. They create the illusion of flow.
There’s an alchemy at work here: something that transforms brain droppings into something worth dropping. The active ingredient isn’t genius. Nor is it intelligence. Writing Mental Immunity taught me this: the real active ingredient is grit. Sheer cussedness. In my case at least, determination makes up for a dearth of genius: I just re-work the crap that spills out in drafts, and eventually — on the fifteenth or twentieth round of edits — something worthwhile emerges.
Who says you can’t polish a turd?
So here’s my advice: don’t assume that writing comes easy for real writers. Don’t assume that their minds are like cloudless skies. Don’t conclude that your mind is clouded by comparison. Your thinking will become as cloudless as you make it.
You just need to put in the time and effort. Reconcile yourself to ugly beginnings. Then get busy. Ponder and winnow. Critique and tweak. Scour and scrub.
Burnish that shit. Keep at it and eventually you’ll have something.
Writing well is painstaking, but it doesn’t have to be painful. Shed the expectations that make it excruciating, and the process becomes less of a grind.
Writing is humbling. It constantly reminds me of my mind’s limitations. But you can allow the friction to sand off your mind’s rough edges. You can lean into the opportunity for self-transformation, and become a clearer thinker.
And quite apart from the self-transformation, when you’re done, you have a piece of good writing — the kind of leave-behind that makes you look smarter than you really are.
Andy Norman is the author of Mental Immunity. He has written for Scientific American, Psychology Today, Skeptic, and Free Inquiry. He works to inoculate humanity against cognitive contagion.
