Should Writing be Difficult?

A missive in which I consider the consequences of believing that writing should be hard work and the necessity of bringing more ease into my writing practice.

The light at the end of a v. dark tunnel. Circa 2012. Somewhere in Europe.

The first year of this endeavor to finally be the writer I think I can be was difficult. I wasn’t struggling to write, I was struggling. Period.

I often slept 12 or 14 hours a night and still could barely lift myself out of bed. I was stiff. My joints ached. I moved at the pace of a snail down the hall to the bathroom. Each footfall was heavy and labored. The skin on my back experienced swaths of tingles and a roving warm sensation. My heart palpitated so frequently that I admitted myself to the emergency room more than once. My brain was buried deep in a fog. Thoughts swirled at speed, making it impossible to grasp onto one.

I was scattered, unmoored. It was hard enough to get myself in the propped-up position for writing in the first place, let alone tend to single essays. All I could really manage was Morning Pages, which I rarely did in the morning and the best I could muster from myself was one or two drafted and edited essays a month, and then burnout struck. I’d need rest for weeks before I could put my attention back on my work with any kind of focus. That’s all I had: one or two good days and then a long rest.

In other words, writing, or some aspects of writing, writing with focus and intent, despite all the doors I’d wandered through in my practice, was still really, really difficult.

This inability to work consistently or as much as I needed to build anything substantial contributed to a shame cycle I was already living: the I’m not enough shame cycle. I’m sure you know the one. It seems to be the base layer shame cycle alongside I’m too much.

Not feeling enough in regard to work and money-earning endeavors, has been a particular sore point for me. I have literally failed at every job I’ve ever had in the ways that are necessary to keep said jobs: being on time and being consistently attentive for as many hours as is needed to make the appropriate amounts of money in order to survive, let alone live, or hope against hope: thrive.

I tried not to contribute to the shame, but I beat myself about it. How could I become a solvent writer if I couldn’t manage to write anything at all? All the dreams and desires I finally believed possible were slipping away. So I took a step back and asked myself what I might offer a friend who was experiencing such a crisis and as much as I was capable, I began to relent to the exhaustion. I stayed in bed as long as I felt I needed to. I indulged in it. I lowered my expectations: brushing my teeth and washing my face was a win. Morning Pages were a bonus. I bought frozen dinners and soups and as many premade and easy meals as I could find since cooking felt impossible. In other words, I brought as much ease into my days as I could.

And I started to wonder whether or not there was anything I could do to bring more ease into my writing. Into bringing pieces to fruition. For all I knew this was my life going forward so I had to figure out how to work with myself, rather than against myself, or I’d spend more time hating myself than I would writing.

Hoping to explore some ideas, I posed this consideration, making writing more easeful, to a writer friend and she comes back at me with “I don’t think writing should be easy.” I was completely caught off-guard. Though I distinguish, however arbitrarily, a difference between easy and easeful; if writing shouldn’t be easy, the implication is that it should be difficult.

And should it? If it should, that’s not worked for me.

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Early in my MA at Bath Spa University we gathered for a weekend in Dorset. We went rambling and heard lectures from some of the professors and other invited writers and instructors. A new cohort bonding experience!

One of the profs, in their lecture, tried to make the point that writing every day is key, even when it’s difficult. She emphasized that writing that’s flowing is often bad writing. I can’t remember her exact words, but that’s the impression they left. In other words, writing that’s easeful is generally bad writing, and writing that is difficult is good?

Back in 2008, writing was difficult and I often felt like I was doing it (along with everything else) wrong, to the point that I thought my flash fiction had to be a novel. I worked to make my stories fit the ideas I had for them, rather than allow them to be whatever they were. I painstakingly coaxed and stretched and molded them. I worried over them and hated them and hated myself for not writing them better. So, I got this joke and laughed along with everyone else.

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I now know that at least part of my struggle last year was the wheat. I had stopped eating wheat for years but I did some testing and really, truly thought that eating imported organic and sprouted Einkorn wheat was totally fine. Not making me sick at all!

And I really thought I’d done my due diligence. Really thought that my body had no response to it.

So slowly over the course of a few years, or maybe all at once, my life was full of glorious pasta and chewy toast. My tongue enjoyed this very, very much. But just as slowly, my body began to react and I ignored the symptoms. Ignored isn’t the right word, I refused to make the connection for a very long time.

I declined slowly enough that I couldn’t see it. My doctor had me come in for monthly Vitamin B shots and I saw a physical therapist to help with the pain. I was convinced the digestive symptoms weren’t that bad. Nothing like I’d experienced before, after all! The hair loss was aging. The arthritis, too.

Then I got COVID in August and spent a month, more or less, isolated in my room. I wasn’t capable of shopping for myself and sending my parents out for very specific bread wasn’t a high priority, so I had them stock me up with more GF/DF frozen dinners and soups.

Even before I was virally well again, I understood, finally, that gluten had once again screwed my life, and so have not gone back.

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Writing that is a slog to write tends to feel like a slog to read.

I spent years struggling with humanities essays, I’d find myself reading the same sentence over and over again and knowing, in theory, I understood each word individually but the way they were strung together made understanding the sentence near impossible. I assumed I just wasn’t smart enough to understand academic writing.

But after 20 years in and out of academic programs, working with PhD students agonizing over their dissertations, and observing that academic burnout is a real problem, especially amongst the untenured and systemically disprivileged academics, it’s become clear to me that academic writing is often hard to read because those writing it often aren’t in a state of ease through the process.

This is pure observational conjecture, but it seems that many become blocked around topics that once ignited passion and the writing that comes through those blocks is difficult to read.

Many of us feel it’s just as it should be when we show up to the blank page and agonize. That we don’t know where to start, that we can’t keep focused on and finish projects. It’s such a struggle to write that many of us who spend one to seven years of our time and money earning advanced degrees in writing, stop writing altogether because that struggle is real. And anyone who comes by writing easily is met with skepticism.

The words flow in the same way shit flows. Was that the joke made that day?

And I wonder if we believe writing should be difficult because we associate difficulty with work. Hard work is often synonymous with work worth having been done. Work worth the money it earned (no matter how little that money was!). Working at McDonald’s is, people say, an honorable job and it’s hard work. McDonald’s employees go home smelling like grease and burgers every night, develop back pain at a young age, are regularly yelled at by irate customers who just, like, didn’t get their dipping sauces, and every time I go into any fast food restaurant, the mood, one I remember viscerally from my days at Taco Bell, is apathetic despair.

Most of the employees are under 20 and this is how they start their working life. This is how I started my working life at the tender age of 15 and what it left me with is an understanding that hard work is the only morally and theoretically valued work, that we must all suffer in our work lives, and that though ‘hard work’ is valued, it’s not so valued that anyone wants to pay a decent wage for it.

Those working the hardest are typically the least paid and the most miserable and the most likely to be abused and exploited. So I think this idea that writing should be hard is internalized, capitalistic, industrial revolution, neoliberal mumbo jumbo that lives in our bodies. Does it make you uncomfortable in your body to engage in work that feels easeful? Do you know what that feels like? (I still don’t.) How does it feel to earn gobs of money for doing very little? Yeah, I don’t know the answer to that question myself either.

But if there is any truth to this theory, if writing that is fun and easeful, and playful, feels less valuable, we need to deprogram it. I wonder what would happen if we were able to shift our expectations, if we fully embraced and embodied the idea that writing can and should be easeful, what might we find there? And how would we do that?

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Julia Cameron’s, The Artist’s Way, was my first toe dip into releasing some of these things from my brain and body. Morning Pages have been my guiding light on this path (and of course also the food I put into my mouth).

While at Bath Spa, well before I’d learned about Morning Pages or Julia Cameron, I began heading into the centre for a tea with my journal. I always intended to work on writing that was meant for classes and my thesis, but instead, I wrote, by hand, everything that was in my head until I felt completely spent an hour or so later. I then closed my notebook, had a look around at all the cosy conversations happening, packed up my things, and went home. Soon enough I started waking in the morning with lines running through my head, or I’d see pieces emerge amongst the rubble of one of these coffee shop free-writes and I slashed out words until I had something.

My thesis, a novel that’s still not finished, probably benefited, but it’s hard to tell considering there was so much anxiety around it. And frankly, I’m not sure I considered these other pieces, the ones that came effortlessly, easefully, worthy pieces of writing. I called them ‘things’ rather than writings and though a couple of them were published, I was too embarrassed of them to take them seriously (though that’s maybe how I felt in general at the time).

Writing freely for three notebook pages every day, even if not in the morning, loosens things up and lowers the stakes, and it has created trust in myself as a writer. Keeping my regular Morning Pages practice, even in extreme circumstances where I’m struggling to write anything more polished, keeps me rooted in the knowledge that I will find my way back. And that once again a sense of ease and effortlessness around drafting pieces will emerge.

Sincerely,

Invitation for Reflection:

Whether or not you practice or have ever practiced creative endeavors, what areas of your life feel really really hard right now? Can you allow them to be 5 or 10% more easeful?

If not, are there areas in our life that feel more easeful? And can you turn your attention to them and lean into that easefulness and set aside the stuff that feels difficult, giving the rest a chance to percolate in the background?

If you are or would like to practice creative endeavors but find it difficult, can you pull back from staring at a blank page and hoping a poem just pops out through your fingertips and lean into doing the most easeful, easy, fun, creative thing you can think of right now?

Three Morning Pages is a good start, but cranking up Spotify and having a singalong or doing a bit of coloring are low-stakes options as well.