I'm a Fiction Writer; I Hate It

Okay, okay, I don’t hate it. I love being an author. I love creating my own world and becoming the god of it every time my pen hits the paper. I love breathing life into my characters, nuancing their every motive, exploiting their built-in weaknesses, defining their strengths. I love giving people an escape into another reality, providing readers with redemption from the mundane and the ability to feel magic again. I love getting lost in my own imagination, following my wildest muses to wherever they might lead. It’s addicting, it’s life-giving. It’s giving into insanity just a little bit to see what your mind can really come up with if you’re the one making the rules. I love fiction. I love creating it. Here’s what I hate about it:

The writing part.

Now you might be saying, “how can you call yourself a writer of any sort if you hate the act of writing?”. You might be surprised to hear it, but some of the greatest writers in the history of novels, poetry, and storytelling have experienced the same love-hate relationship with authorship. Take a look at what some of these icons had to say about their own process.

“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” — Kurt Vonnegut

“Writing is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.” — Flannery O’Connor

“I really hate to write, I get no fun out of it because I can’t get up and say I’m working, close my door, have coffee brought to me, and sit there camping like a ‘man of letters’.” — Jack Kerouac

“I hate writing. I love having written.” — Dorothy Parker

All these frustrations hit a similar note. Finding a way to perfectly mirror on paper that which is rattling around in one’s head is, well, torture. No matter what genre of literature you produce, vomiting your mind onto a blank slate is one of the most grueling tasks to take up. Fiction carries it’s own unique complications of course. Questions arise such as:

• Am I spending too much time describing every little detail, thereby leaving no room for the imagination of the reader?
• Am I not spending enough time on descriptions, thereby leaving too much ambiguity for the reader?
• Are my characters exactly how I created them to be, living and breathing with their own evolving traits and agendas? Or are they poor, paper cut-outs pasted sloppily into a world that is not their own?
• Do my protagonists possess convincing and relatable motivation? Are they vulnerable and human enough?
• Do my antagonists strike the right chord between empathy and disdain? Do their backstories line up realistically with their actions?
• Is the dialogue organic or robotic?

• Is it time to kill this person off? Is it time to introduce this new character?
• Am I putting off actually working on all these things by wasting time on this article?

It’s a vicious cycle. One that I constantly fall victim to throughout my writing process. Yet, there’s still hope for me. Why? Here’s my theory.

People who think writing is easy, who see it as effortless, and come by it without any struggle whatsoever; they actually suck at it.

I firmly believe that only amateur, elementary writers have no problem with writing. The amateurs don’t relentlessly labor over nuances, overthink sentence structures, strangle themselves over every little detail, or feel the urge to burst into tears after reading just one paragraph of their own. They don’t deal with any of that. Because they don’t know better. They don’t know that they ought to kill themselves over their work. To put it simply: if you feel like writing is easy, you’re more than likely not very good at it.

Fellow authors, novelists, poets, storytellers, and world-builders, If you loathe yourself every time your pen hits the paper or your digits touch the keyboard, you’re on the right track. Unlike the amateurs, you have tasted the pure art that words can become, and you want to recreate that in your own masterpiece. You desire beauty, excellence, magic, and power in what you produce; you won’t settle for anything less. So you write. You rewrite. You scrap that. You start all over again until that scene in your heads plays out perfectly on paper, or that dialogue feels so human that it’s like the reader is in it themselves. You refine and sharpen that character until he or she is an extension of you on paper. You pour out your very soul into that story, with all the agony and self-hatred it takes, because that’s what a writer does.

I’m a fiction writer, and I can proudly say that I hate it. I hate it with every fiber in my body. But what brings me back to those pages every time is one simple, unescapable truth: no one else can write my story better than me. Not even Tolkien could write a better version of my world, nor could George R. R. Martin develop a more gripping cast of characters. Hemingway wouln’t tell it quite right, and C.S. Lewis would get it wrong. Not to say these aren’t great authors (the above listed are some of my heroes), but I am confident that they couldn’t tell my story best, because it isn’t theirs. It’s mine. And only I know exactly how it needs to look in the end. That book you’re working on, that boring section you’re trying to fix, that final chapter you can’t seem to get right, it’s yours. It’s all yours, and no one else can get it right except for you. Is that daunting? Maybe. But more than anything, it is empowering.

In conclusion, I encourage all my fellow writers, fiction or otherwise, to pick up the pen once more. Get back to your desk and crack open the laptop. Dehydrate yourself with all the espresso or whiskey that you’d like, and get back to that damn story. Lock yourself in a room with a single lit candle, turn on your favorite soundtrack, bang your head against the wall, tie yourself to your chair, do whatever you have to do to keep writing. You must keep writing. Your story has to be told. Your hero has reach their destination. Your villain has to meet their reckoning. Your anti-hero has to decide who he or she will become. Your world has to be explored and conquered. And that last chapter has to conclude with an ending that will haunt readers for the rest of their days.

Before any words have been formed, the story is already inside of you. Like every artist, you have created something wonderful before it has even become concrete. But if you don’t tear it out of your clattering brain, no one else will be able to do it for you. Keep at it. Extract everything you can from your head into your first draft. It won’t be perfect, it will probably suck. But until it’s all on a canvas, you won’t be able to see what needs to be refined. Hate that first draft, shred everything you dislike. Recreate, then recreate again. Loathe the process, but dream of the end result. Keep dreaming through the blood, sweat, and tears until you can see it in front of you. Writing will be the death of you, but having written is more worth it than anything you could have ever lived.

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway