Writing is hard.

While writing my newsletter the other day, I noted to my recipients that writing a book takes a lot longer than drawing or painting a picture. If I can write an hour a day (which I can only sometimes manage while holding down a day job), I can write a chapter in a week. A lot of books are about 50 chapters long, so that’s about a year to write a rough draft. That’s under perfect circumstances and doesn’t include brain drain, exhaustion, working overtime, vacations, holidays, or editing.

That’s a lot of time and energy.

Not only that, but writing well is hard.

By writing well, I mostly mean writing so that people find what you’re writing to be legible. If you’ve ever read beginner writer’s efforts, you know what I mean. Those early stories people first write don’t always make a lot of sense — not just from a character or plot perspective, but also from a sentence perspective. To go from those early shit efforts to something that not only makes sense, but is also believable and interesting, takes a lot of time and practice and hard-to-hear critiques. Longer, in my experience, than it takes to go from drawing stick figures to decent figure drawings.

I read a book a long time ago now, called The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker. In it, the author describes how learning to speak is as much an instinct in humans as flight is in birds, or swimming in fish. We’re just programmed to figure it out.

Here’s the thing though: writing is not speaking a language. There is no instinct for writing. Language is something that children just do, like walking or laughing. Reading and writing are inventions, like driving cars or building houses, and they are skills that must be taught. Some people are naturals at them, some people can do them okay, and some people will struggle with them all their lives.

(I would argue that inventing things is maybe also a human instinct, which some people possess to a larger or lesser degree, but I’m not a researcher in any scientific field, so that’s just an interesting imponderable on my part. But I digress.)

However, while both reading and writing are skills that have to be learned and practiced to get better at it, once a reader is decent at it (Or has a natural aptitude for it), reading feels like listening to someone talk inside your head.

And that intersection of an invention and an instinct is where writing gets tricky.

In order to write well, so that other people enjoy your writing, you have to write (a learned skill) like people talk (an instinct), but not like they actually talk. More like a talented presenter might speak. But you have to find a way to strike a balance between sounding like how real people talk and how a talented presenter gives a speech. Swing too far one way or the other, and the voice in the reader’s head starts to sound too sloppy and unintelligent or too stiff and formal.

An aspiring writer must also be able to formulate what they’re trying to say cohesively to themselves before they try to bring the idea across to others, without any hand gestures or pointing or being able to say “you know, like that!” Thus part of why many writers’ early efforts are garbage.

Drawing is quite different. I used to teach beginner drawing lessons (I may yet again, depending on where life takes me), and one of the things I preached was that people will not notice if you make a mistake. They truly won’t. Their eyes will want to see what you’re trying to portray. There might be other critiques of your work, but a line out of place or a scribble where there wasn’t supposed to be one will get passed right over by a human eye that wants to see meaningful shapes in the pencil lines in front of it. Also, the classes I taught were six-week courses. My students were turning out nice stuff before the six weeks were even up.

Music is different from writing, too. It’s more like drawing. It’s instinctive, something children  gravitate towards and do without prompting. An overall well-played song will be well-received, and no one but another musician will notice the drummer that was off beat for a count or the bass riff that was a key above the song for three notes. The human ear wants to hear rhythm and melody, and so it does. It will gloss over the little errors.

To an extent, a reader will also gloss over small errors in written prose, but not nearly as much. Typos can glare and cause the reader’s inner voice to trip. A too-frequently repeated phrase can start to seem jarring very quickly. A writing style that is a too-literal interpretation of how people actually talk sounds stupid, with too many ums, re-started sentences, mispronounced words. A writing style that is too polished sounds academic and stiff.

The human brain has no instinctive desire to see past the flaws in writing and make it make sense. The writer has to write well in order for the reader to enjoy it. Of course taste is subjective and different styles are suited to different types of writing, but the bottom line is that the burden is on the writer to make the reader hear the voice the writer is trying to put across. And the reader’s inner ear doesn’t instinctively want to hear that voice in the same way that it wants to hear music in sound or see a meaningful shape on a canvas. That takes practice.

None of this is to belittle the time or effort that goes into any of the other arts. Of course they take work, of course they take practice, of course they can require tearful critique before the artist starts to become “good.”

And perhaps my evidence is anecdotal, at least to an extent. I started drawing after one lesson with a friend. I started drawing well after that single lesson. And since I found I was actually half-way good at it, practicing was easy. I still doodle or draw from time to time, and I like what I produce. I get compliments. I taught lessons for a few years. My students drew well after just a few lessons.

I started drumming in drum circles. Not often. I got my own drum, which mostly gathered dust. I always enjoyed myself. I was told I had good rhythm. I fell into drumming in a band ass first while drunk, and since I was pretty decent at it right away, practicing was easy. I still sit in with some friends at shows once in a while, and we get compliments on what we do.

I started writing when I was eleven. I sucked. But I loved it, so I worked harder at it. I still sucked. I kept going. I wrote boring stories with bad prose. I got critique, I worked at it, I sucked less, I got critique, I worked at it, I sucked less. I finally feel, at forty-six years old, like I’m pretty decent at what I do. Not great. Not amazing. Pretty decent. I have my fans. I know my own voice. I’m no Stephen King or Neil Gaiman. And not everyone agrees that those guys are great writers. I happen to admire them.

Perhaps my perception of what’s hard and what’s not has to do with the level that I’m trying to reach with these things I do — I’ve always been happy to draw for myself and for friends. I’ve taken a few commissions, taught lessons, but I’ve never strived for critical acclaim or to show in galleries that aren’t local, or to make a living as an artist. The bands I drummed in were local bar bands. I played with one Middle-Eastern inspired band for the studio I belly dance with. We had a lot of fun, one of the bands even recorded a mediocre album, but we never intended to play anywhere other than local bars, a few parties, or to impress anyone other than the local live music-lovers.

My writing, though. While I don’t necessarily want to win any awards, I want to attract as many people as I can. I want to make a living doing it. For a while, I sought an agent and a publisher. Maybe that’s why it seems harder? Because of who and how many I’m trying to impress?

Maybe. I’ll concede to maybe.

But I also stand by the idea that music and drawing are instinctive, while writing and reading are inventions. People just want to like the first two. They almost can’t seem to help themselves. Even people who don’t actively pursue listening to music or viewing art will like something they hear on the radio or see in passing. There are no casual readers who go “Gee, I like the way that billboard pointed out that gas station. Very clear and concise.” The human brain doesn’t want to like writing the way it does other things.

My job is to make what I write enjoyable.

I’m trying.