Living Writing. Or: In Which Writing Is Compared To Peanut Butter Yet Again

Writing has always been a very organic process to me. Many times I'll have questions spinning in my head—What will my MC do about so-and-so? What does she want to study in college? How will she react to this? What's her favorite ice cream flavor? What does she think about that?—and for some reason, no matter how much I think about it or which way I examine it, nothing seems to fit. Nothing's right.

I'll be struggling for days, trying to figure out if my character wants to study physics or marine biology or open a restaurant, and I'll come up with nothing. Nada. I’m talking crickets in my ears, people. I’ll push and push and get so frustrated at myself because How could I think I could actually write a book? I’m nowhere near as good as I thought I was. 

And then.

I’ll get so tired of putting off my inevitable failure, and I’ll park my butt in front of the computer. Start typing, even though I don't know where I'm going with it. At all. I fully expect to come up with nothing once again. It's inevitable, right? Since I've basically been drawing a blank for forever.

But . . . the moment I need to type down the thing I’ve been searching for, the thing I’m sure I’ll never have an answer to—it somehow, somehow, comes to me. Just like that. Simple and quiet and easy. And I'll smack my forehead and be like, "Of course! How could I not have seen this?"

But the thing is, it's all part of the process. The days or weeks or months of struggling are important into coming to this point, and I don't think I could get to it any other way. It’s like the peanut butter jar thing. You struggle forever to unscrew the lid and along comes someone else and pops it open, just like that. This is exactly like that—only you’re both people: The sweaty one fighting to open the jar and the suave one who flicks it open with barely a flick of your wrist.

So yeah. It’s all part of the process. And each and every time I reach that breakthrough, whether it’s a huge game-changing point for my novel or just a little detail about a secondary character—each and every time, I fall in love with the magic of writing all over again.

To me, writing will always be a living thing. It breathes and beats and moves in me, with me, and I love feeling how alive it is. Because it really, really is.

And I wouldn't trade it for the world.