This particular post is directed largely to my writing friends, though many of you who are not writers—that is, writers in a more or less full-time sense—might get a similar take-away message that could be applied to other professions and activities. What I’m talking about here is the most difficult thing I have encountered since starting to (try to) become a full-time, professional writer, and bring in a limited income from writing and publishing novels and short stories.
Writing is not a slap-dash profession. That should be obvious to almost anyone, even to non-writers. One does not merely sit down to write a best-seller (though you may delude yourself into believing that you are), but through a series of starts, stops, tedious read-throughs and edits, one gets a story or book in reasonable form, and tries to get it published. All of that takes time, some money, many letters of query and investigation, and more time. Time is the big factor here.
None of this ever struck me as all that “difficult,” though, in an absolute sense. Being retired, I have the time and I’ve learned through trial and error, through reading books and articles on writing, attending conferences, lectures, and by just plain straight talk with others, how to get it done. (Quality is another matter which I’m not concerned with here.) I’ve been able to do it, one way or another. So what’s the most difficult part about writing?
For me, the most difficult part in my continuing battle with words on the page has always been the transition from one project to another. Writing on one particular story, novel or short story, and putting that away and going to another story has always been difficult. I can’t just drop one and go to another. For example, at the time I’m writing this blog post, I have just sent out copies of my first science-fiction novel manuscript to two contests for unpublished novels. That required getting the manuscript into the format the contests insist on, especially by removing all identifying labels such as my name, address, any acknowledgements, references to previous writings, etc. And I had to read through the submissions several times to make sure they were in proper format. God forbid I should send out a manuscript with errors. But now, a couple of deadlines for short stories are coming up, and I’m going to have to drop the novel (which I like to work on) and take up a totally different story (or, in this case, a couple of stories). Getting the novel out of my mind is time consuming. I have to gear up to the short format, and immerse myself in it to an extent that I can get a good read going. That may take several weeks. Once I get into it, I can whip through it like the proverbial Epsom salts through a widder woman. Getting there is the hardest part.
What’s your hardest part about writing? Or doing anything?