Being a writer ain't all it's cracked up to be...Part 1

Why are you an author? What motivates you? Why do you feel the need to put yourself through such a repititious and gruelling period of endless rewrites, redrafts, mind numbing grammar checks? Why, O Why do you do it?

One answer, and it's a cliche, 'I've got something to say about my view on the world.' This is often the only answer that anyone, or everyone, can get their head around, and I've no need to remind fellow authors such a remark doesn't even come close to the amount of dedication needed from the first word to the very last. Yes, each of those words finds its eventual place on the page. Often you find words buried deep away in that swirling, fluidily crammed lump of grey gristle sitting on top of your weary and bent shoulders.

Then you go through the bloody process of trying to figure out what bit of the 60,000 word jigsaw fits where, and why must it have an order and structure to it. It's your 'baby' who somewhere along the way becomes the devil and you hate and despise it, mainly because none of what's on the pc screen remotely resembles the very conception of an idea you had in the first place. Then you hate it some more!

But your thing of 'beauty' will teeter on the balancing line between sheer madness and immense fruitfulness; and which writer hasn't exhausted every known English derogatory and brutal cuss word imaginable in their quest to finish a chapter that seems to be of an entirely different animal than when you first started it. All the time remonstrating with yourself because your 'beginning, middle and end' is nothing like that. O the tricks that playfully disrupt your thinking, that when you think 'eureka!' 'by god I've got it', nothing could be further from the truth. Finally finishing a chapter could, if you've a battered mind to be, be better than sex; more often than not it's a period of unwillingly performed S & M.

Yet at some point in time, of many days when a six word sentence was all that you was capable of, due to a brain that refuses to function, refuses to obey the commands shouted at it, refuses to accept the 'Lord & Master' has a god given feudal right to a tithe of six horrible words, you finish the book. You've finished the long process of rearing your baby, and reached the point of letting go and sending it out into the world. Despite your baby having mocked you, run away from you, refused to accept your greater wisdom, or stupidity as the case may be, you send it out into the cold light of a brutal world.

Now, this is the point that the former love/hate relationship with your book becomes a full-blown love affair of the highest magnitude. There's nothing like that feeling of having accomplished one of the greatest feats known to virtually every author, a completed book! Despite the weariness of the long tedium that is an inevitable part of crafting a book, your heart lifts, a smile erupts...

And we will continue the final part next time!