Yes, Writing can Suck

What do you get when you cross a poet with a play? 157 pages of junk! That's not a joke, folks. That's reality. What's the use in hearing all the good stuff about writers and writing when you don't hear the realities of the writing process? The truth be told, writing sucks at times. And right now, I'm in the throw of one of the sucky times of the writing process.

Nothing seems to be going well with this play. At first, it flowed rich and creamy, and all of a sudden, bam, whammo, shaboom, it grinds to a dead stop, shredding proverbial shards of metal all over the office on its way to the scrap yard. This is when it sucks. When you have an idea that works, and you can't finish it. When you can't even write a complete sentence because everything you write makes no sense at all anymore.

You want to hear all the good things about writing? You want to hear all the great stories of the writers? Well, before you can understand any of that, you need to understand why all the great writers were alcoholics and suicidal maniacs. The writing process is that reason. Writing sucks, and the ones who make it through the black hole of despair deserve the credit they get for sticking to it and making it work.

Right now, though, what I have is 107 of 157 pages of garbage that goes nowhere. But why, you may ask, did I bring the poet into all of this? The poet is the artist in all of us who wants to write, but the poet is only prepared to write a few lines, not a book, not a play... the poet wants to be memorable in as few words as possible, scratching out a few lines that make him the next poet laureate of the US of A. But nothing has prepared him for the ramshackle of confusion that awaits him when he thumbs through the hundreds of lines he has written, all supposedly coming together to a dramatic climax. The good lines read alone are poetic, yet put them together, and one plus one no longer equals two in this world.

So, if you want to know what the writing process entails for works of art, here they are: confusion, doubt, emptiness, mental exhaustion, anger, depression, and fear. That is the writing process, and don't let some writing teacher tell you any different. If it were easy to create something different, something unique, and something meaningful, then everyone would be doing it. But it's not easy, and the poet turned writer evolves by making it through the process and coming out victor -- piecing the shards together and creating something worthwhile. That is the writer.

Now, if you don't mind, I have to get back to my scrap yard.