I’d like to start off by quoting Jake Peralta from Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
“The hours are long, the danger is constant, and the pay is LOL.”
I think that sums up what it’s like to be a writer. Not the danger part, of course, but replace that with work and you’ve got a sentence that describes every writer’s life. Unless your book becomes famous. In which case the pay is not, in fact, LOL.
But even then, writing isn’t exactly easy. There’s something scary about having an entire book written out in your head—characters, settings, plot twists, dialogue—and then when it comes time to put pen to paper, your brain decides that everything you’ve made up in your mind is unoriginal garbage. So you redraft. And brainstorm again. You type a sentence. Delete it. Type another. Delete that one as well. Soon, an hour has passed, and you’re still staring at a blank document, having only changed the font size. And yet, we keep going. Why?
Because there’s something so incredibly rewarding about taking an idea that only existed in your imagination and turning it into something real. A character that didn’t exist an hour ago suddenly has a name, a specific hair color, and several goals to accomplish. A random idea becomes a paragraph. That paragraph becomes a chapter. Eventually, after many hours and long nights wondering if anyone will like your writing, you have a completed story in front of you.
Writing is often romanticized by people who think that all it takes is a cozy café, some rain, Starbucks coffee, and your laptop to produce sentences worthy of praise from Agatha Christie and J.K. Rowling, but really, it’s being up at 1 a.m., surrounded by food, having a mental argument with a fifteen-year-old character about what she would realistically say in the given scenario. But writing isn’t about waiting for inspiration to strike you like a lightning bolt. If I waited until I had enough inspiration to draft my whole story, I would have written approximately two stories. Writing is about putting in the effort to show up anyway.
It’s about writing that terrible first draft, the one that makes you want to give up. It’s about realizing that people could see your so-called brilliant plot twist coming a mile away. It’s about deleting the 500 words you wrote with sweat and tears because, unfortunately, they are terrible. It’s about writing the same sentence over and over to make sure your reader gets a sense of what you’re conveying. Then every once in a while, you realize, “Wait. I actually like this sentence!” And that makes all the work worth it.
So maybe that’s why writers write. It’s not easy, but there’s something about creating a world by yourself, where you get to decide what happens. You get to give a character that happy ending. You get someone to laugh, or cry, or even see the world a little differently. There’s something about all those “aha” moments combined that gives you something spectacular.
Maybe Jake was right all along. Sure, the hours and work are long, sure the pay is LOL, but the one thing he didn’t include was the satisfaction of creating something new, something original, something entirely your own.