Is that a suggestive title?  I guess, but I’m not going there today.  What I am ranting about today is my desire to tell everyone that says writing is hard to go fuck themselves.  Writing is easy, to me at least, Revision is hard(er).

It was the Friday before I graduated that we had a little writing department thing.  One of the professors said, writing is hard.  I shook my head.  No, no it’s not.  You either do it or you don’t.  I don’t mean that it isn’t hard overall.  Most people don’t like to do it, I get that.  However, in the context of being Writing Majors and the instructors being professionals, it shouldn’t be.

Why would one decide to be a writer if it was so damn hard?  I mean I get that ideas might not be abundant, or that the final version of something might be hard to get to, but it the actual act of sitting down and putting words on paper is so hard, why do it professionally?  Got me.  I started writing and found i loved the hell out of it.  I just went back to school to try and get better at it.

The biggest thing I learned was that revision was not as horrid as I thought.  I hated going back over my work and trying to tear it up.  I mean that to me is the hardest part.  But one thing I did learn, is have other do it for you.  Not editors, that is for when you are close to getting something published.  I mean the part after you write it.  You should have a person(s) able to browse it and tear it up.

That is the part I hated.  But now that I might have others willing to do it for me, cool.  I have no problem making changes where they are needed, the actual revising, I just hate the part where you have to find those things.  My main worry here is that I am bias, I know what I was trying to say.  The way I am saying it might not make a lot of sense to others, but it would to me.  I was told to put distance between me and my work (time away) and then try it.  Even then though I think I would still have a hard time to see it.

This comes back to the idea that one has to “kill their baby”.  Not a real one, bu the work.  I’m not that close to any of my stuff.  I would stomp it in a minute if someone convinced me it would help, but if how I wrote something is in question I doubt my ability to see it as being wrong for others.  That is my problem, and I don’t really want to waste time on changing something that might be ineffective anyway.  It’s easier just to have fresh eyes do that then i change it once for effect (or 2x or 3x) but each time I would have no doubts about it.

Like my first book, well my third, but all three were written at once.  I finally see that the ending is corny and I have to change it.  It’s only taken me 2.5 years to come to that conclusion.  I want to move a little faster on my material……

So in conclusion, Writing is easy, revision is hard.