Writing is hard. Simple but hard.
It’s easy to want to write something. Ideas can come and go all day, I have a notes folder full of them as proof.
Is that writing? Maybe, it’s words on a (digital) page at the very least. Is it writing though.
As a kid I’d have lots of ideas too. And I even started to write stories. I loved reading so much that it wasn’t too much of a leap to think I could write one of those myself.
Somewhere along the way though that was lost and I’m no kid anymore. I haven’t had to write properly in years, no long essays as I did at Uni and even in the jobs I’ve had writing has been limited to a few sentences here and there for a report or a presentation.
Actual writing is something that’s been left behind. Ideas I can have all the live long day, thoughts come and go and get strung together all the time.
Committing those thoughts to a page, to writing them down, making them exist physically is something I haven’t practiced in years.
The only writing I’ve done somewhat consistently is in a journal. That’s writing with a very specific purpose for a very specific audience: me. And me alone. To help turn those thoughts into something else, to untangle them and make sense of them.
But it is still creative, turning thoughts into something else, something I need to read one word after the other, something that flows and makes sense it reads one section after the other.
Creative writing doesn’t come naturally, it’s work, for me at least. The ideas flow, but the writing, that takes effort and a will to do it.
