A Writer sits at her Writing Desk, which she paid too much money for because she fell in love with it at first sight. She sips a hot cup of coffee, or tea, and stares at her professional Writing Instrument of choice—whether it is a computer, typewriter, or notebook matters not, because in any case the page before her is utterly blank. But we mustn’t mistake this blankness for idleness; she has deleted, or crumpled and tossed away, a thousand pages—a thousand beginnings that weren’t worth continuing.
At day’s end, she curses the Writing Instrument for its inadequacies, and perhaps even the Writing Desk for doing nothing to help. She curses the Muse that never visited her, the distractions that thwarted her efforts, herself for her own shortcomings, and finally, the craft of writing itself. “I hate this,” she hisses, dropping her head into her hands, and gives up for the day.
The page, of course, is still blank.
This is the image we paint of writers—gallant, suffering creative souls who derive more pain than pleasure from their so-called “passion” and who seem to spend more time struggling to write than actually writing. And to be fair, there are days when this portrayal doesn’t strike far from the mark.
But do writers actually hate writing?
Why Writers Do Hate Writing—Sometimes
I can’t deny that I’ve had days where I wanted to give it all up. I get exhausted, frustrated, or downright depressed, and suddenly running off to be the Wise Woman of the Woods seems vastly more appealing than spending one more minute banging out mediocre prose on a worn-out keyboard. Never mind that I am hopeless with directions and would be dead without access to prescription medications and prepackaged sources of protein—in those bleak moments, all I really want is to lay down the proverbial quill and rest.
But as someone who writes for the love of it as well as for income, can I honestly say that I hate writing?
On one of those dark days, I might be tempted to say “yes.” I certainly have hated things I’ve written, and I’ve hated some of the writing I’ve had to do just to keep my income, well, incoming. I hate that I spend more time staring at screens than wandering in the great outdoors, and sometimes I hate that the stories I want to read haven’t been written yet and that I have to do all the hard work of writing them myself.
And on those days that it truly is hard to write, I hate writing. At least, it feels like I do.
But like all storms, this too passes, and inevitably I find it harder to live without being a writer than to live with it.
What Writers Actually Hate About Writing
It’s not that writers hate writing itself. Not really. The true object of our loathing is this: that the words we ultimately write always seem to fall short of the incredible worlds and people we carry with us in our heads and hearts.
As a storyteller, I feel like I owe something to the characters that come to me begging to tell their stories, and the beautiful worlds that allow me to pass into and out of them without lasting harm. And no matter how good I get or how wonderful a writing day I might have, that debt never feels fully repaid. At best, I can hope it will simply be forgiven in the end, in light of the sheer effort I put into trying to pay it off. But actually writing my way out of that debt myself? Never gonna happen.
That’s the worst part of being a writer. Mere words on a page never seem to fully encompass the stories we want to tell. We always have to settle for “good enough.” As Gene Fowler so aptly put it, “A book is never finished; it’s abandoned.”
Writing as a Passion
Passion is a double-edged sword. The more you care about something, the more joy it can bring you—or bitterly disappoint you. After all, if you didn’t care, it wouldn’t hurt.
Muses are fickle. They visit when they please, whether it is convenient or not, and depart whenever they grow bored of us. It’s as true for writers as it is for musicians, visual artists, or anyone else knee-deep in a creative project. And in between the honeymoon daze of those brief, fleeting visits, we are abandoned, left utterly on our own. Those are the difficult times, the times of dragging ourselves out of bed when we would rather sleep for centuries, of shoving our own noses to the grindstone until we’re ground down to dust. And then, we take a break. After a good sleep (or not), we get back up and do it all over again.
But if we writers suffer when we write, it is because we also savor it. If we complain that we hate writing, it is only because we love it so much—even when it doesn’t love us back.
Kim Berkley is a fantasy author and narrative designer. Her published works include The Harbinger’s Head, an interactive fiction novel set in a fantastical version of 19th century Ireland, and The Dragon’s Last Flight, a fantasy visual novel currently under development (but you can play the demo for free here).
