Why Writing is So Hard

“I could go on about all this autobiography vs. fiction stuff—pull Michael Herr’s masterwork Dispatches into the fray, or Exley’s “fictional memoir” A Fan’s Notes, or quote you Hemingway, even—but all I’m really trying to get at here is that, as a writer who sometimes uses personal experience as a way into a story, it can and often does get complicated. Even just thinking about what to write about can start me looping on the past—or present, or future, or never-was or will-be—and like a centrifuge, I’ll spin out parts of myself, magnify and obsess about them. And just like anything else you take apart and study, it’s easy to get overwhelmed at the complexity of it all when you try to sense-make it back together; to panic, spout expletives, blame my parents, maybe throw some proximate objects. Usually I deep breathe for a while, exit the area. Maybe I’ll go for a walk, or to the gym, or jerk off, or have a drink, or all of it…whatever I can do to calm myself down a little before attempting to put it back together again. Sometimes I can, other times I can’t, because putting things back together is difficult and I’m not a mechanic and an even worse headshrinker—I’m a writer.”

“Hemingway’s “The first draft of anything is shit,” Hawthorne’s “Easy reading is damned hard writing,” or Thompson’s take: “I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs.””