Writing is hard

By Kristin Khadija Mahmoud

Writing is hard.  The hardest. You’ve spent hours staring at the screen and there is barely anything written.

You go days and maybe write a sentence and that sentence doesn’t look like much.  There is no avalanche of ideas bursting forth, eager to get onto paper before they fly away.  What you actually have are moths eating holes in the sweaters you’ve had in your closet for ages.

Sometimes there is a great idea itching to get out but when you sit down to work on that idea, nothing seems to come out right.  Characters and dialogue are contrite and you feel like hurling your computer across the room.

Writing requires time that you barely have, patience when you’ve run out, and determination despite staring up a steep mountain.  

You will spend hours in a day, days in a week, weeks in a month, and so on, toiling away at a new project just to see it rejected each time it is submitted.  It is exhausting and hard.

But it makes you feel alive.  Literal wind beneath your literary wings.  Writing is the reason you get up, it is the dream that burns like a white hot fire that will burn you up each time you try to silence the words.

It is hard but you would not trade it for anything.