Writing is Hard AF

Keep calm and cull on.

Photo by Xavi Cabrera on Unsplash

I am sitting in a Starbucks, having just finished reading through my entire 79,000-word memoir manuscript for the first time.

I say “manuscript” but it’s far from done.

It’s also so, so far from where I started.

Writing a memoir is the mother of all mindfucks. Truly. The experience of dredging up and writing my way through trauma and other formative life experiences while simultaneously trying to be a functional human in my real life is an exhausting duality I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

It has also been the most magically cathartic, gut-wrenchingly glorious experience of my life.

I still have a long way to go, which daunts me daily. But I’ve come too far to give up. I’ve stopped and started working on this book so many times over the past several years. It’s changed genres more than once. I’ve psyched myself up and beaten myself down and psyched myself back up again so often I feel like the needle on a polygraph test when someone’s pants are on fire.

But now, here I am: the writer of a 257-page, 79,000-word Google Doc. My book is in there somewhere. I just have to keep going, keep crafting, keep culling.

Michelangelo is known for saying of sculpting that the sculpture was already inside the block of marble, that he had only to keep chiseling, keep carving until the sculpture emerged and could be set free.

Writing is not like that. Writers aren’t given a block of marble to start with. Nope. To me, writing this memoir has been more like being plonked down in a vast pit of Lego. It’s uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. Always uncomfortable. But worth it, because in and amongst these seemingly infinite bricks are the ones you need. Every brick is a word, and as you begin to build, the words become sentences which become stories. Some of the pieces aren’t right. They may be the wrong shape or color. Those, you need to discard. Even if they’re pieces that are meaningful to you. They just might not fit this particular build. So you put them aside, feel your feelings about that, and keep building.

Like Michelangelo and his block of marble, you don’t know exactly what you’re building, but you have to trust you’ll know when it’s the thing that you were meant to build. If it’s not right, you have to trust you’ll know what needs to change. Some bricks need to be removed, replaced, repositioned. You keep building.

You let other people look at your build. Just a few trusted people. They offer their opinions. They suggest changes to your build. Some changes you make, some you don’t. Because this build is yours, after all. It has to stay uniquely yours.

Some days, it feels like you can’t find any of the right pieces, and the ones you do find don’t fit together the way you want them to. Those days are very discouraging.

Sometimes you feel like ripping the whole thing apart and pretending you never wanted to build it in the first place. Those times are very hard.

Other days, you build so quickly, so smoothly, you amaze yourself. You make more progress in a single day than maybe you did over the entire previous week. Or maybe even the entire previous month. What you’ve built looks incredible. Those days are good. Those days fill your soul.

Sometimes you look at what you built the day before and it’s gorgeous. Other times, you look at what you built the day before and it sucks. Either way, you do what you need to do. You keep what you want to keep, change what you need to change. You keep building.

At this moment, my build is structurally sound. I could live in this build if I had to. But it’s too big. It meanders in too many directions. It’s got too many drafty spots, too many wonky spots. But it’s also more impressive than anything I’ve ever built before, so I’m going to take a moment to sit here and take it in, to savor what I’ve accomplished.

And then I will get back to it. I’ll look at the overall structure and smooth it out. I’ll remove any extraneous bricks and replace weak bricks with stronger ones. I’ll pare it down and shore it up until it’s the build that represents the best of me. I’ll keep going until it’s a build that I will be proud to show the world. A build that will entertain and inspire and help people.

I owe you all nothing less.

I owe myself nothing less.

But, for this moment, I’m just going to sit here and take a breath.