It’s Okay to Have a Love/Hate Relationship With Your Writing

One of my moments of greatest relief as a writer—equal, perhaps, to the swell and crest of learning that my first novel would be published—was when, decades ago, my Intro to Creative Writing professor assigned Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” and I arrived at this passage: “Very few writers…go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow…. For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous.”

Before reading this, I had believed something was wrong with me. I loved writing; I knew I loved writing. But also, I hated writing. To put a finer point on it, I squirmed with discomfort at the act of putting words on the page. Often, the only way I could write was to curl into the fetal position in my desk chair and rock, clunking my forehead against my knees, until eventually, reluctantly, tremulously, I’d lift my hands to the keyboard and peck out a word.

It is a strange feeling to be both compelled to do something and repelled in the doing of that same thing. What relief to discover that other writers, published ones yet, felt the same way!

Writing is uncomfortable. After you face the vulnerability of drafting a manuscript, you listen to often-bracing critical feedback on that manuscript, after which you enter the dizzying, stymieing revision process, but then—thank all the stars in the sky—you’re done! Just kidding. You’re not nearly finished. Now you’re on to the slog of trying to publish the darned thing.

It is no wonder writers use the language of hurt to describe the process. I’ve had students tell me they want workshop to be “painful” and “brutal,” which I take to mean that they want us to be honest about their work. However, it is both interesting and unsurprising to me that they assume this candor must wound.

And this brings me back to my eighteen-year-old writer self, who seesawed like some tempestuous lover in a romantic comedy: I love writing! But I hate writing! But I love writing! Over two decades and four novels later, I am here to report back that writing is not any easier or more comfortable; however, I have discovered a useful trick.

I have learned that because writing is so often so difficult, hateful even, it is helpful to embrace the “I love writing” half of the litany. I have found it both creatively and emotionally beneficial to write toward what I love.

I wrote and published my first two novels with my teeth clenched and my fists balled. Writing was hard; this I knew well; and hey look at me; I was doing the hard thing. But then I wrote a novel that no one wanted, and at the same time my agent changed jobs. It felt like what I’d been working toward (in what I’ll freely admit was a charmed career) had disappeared in an instant. This would’ve been a fine time to proclaim, “I hate writing!”

And while it’s true that I did feel frustrated and dejected, the main thing I felt, after all the other feelings had dissipated, was love: Love for reading fiction, love for the challenge of writing fiction, and love for what arrives on the page. The month was December. I’d write a new story in the New Year, I decided, and I’d put everything I loved inside of it.

So I did that. I wrote a short story set in the near-future San Francisco about a woman who works as a glorified customer service rep, administering a technology that tells people what will make them happy, while her own teenage son is profoundly unhappy. And I filled the story with beloved things, including awkward office interactions, quirky futuristic technology, the places in relationships where sadness and happiness get muddled, and the morning light in San Francisco out in the avenues.

The story grew into what would become my third novel, Tell the Machine Goodnight, and as I wrote, I kept on stuffing it with more and more things I love, whether in fiction or in life: teenage detectives, an empathetic scream queen, a governess in a haunted house, also, monitor lizards. (Did you know? They can count!) The novel grew around these loves and it became the shape they wanted it to be, like a tree spangled with baubles and tinsel.

Tell the Machine Goodnight is about happiness, so it makes sense that it was written through and about things that make me happy. But listen to this: My new novel, My Murder, is about a woman, Lou, who was murdered and cloned and returned to her old life. In short, it’s about trauma. Once again, as I wrote, I filled the book with things that I love, this time things I love in mystery/thrillers: twisty plotlines, armchair detectives, deadpan humor, an alluring femme fatale, a charismatic serial killer, a prickly babysitter, and more.

I still had to force myself through many uncomfortable writing sessions, and I still had to look flinty eyed at my revisions. However, it turned out that what I’d found pleasing and joyous and fun in the manuscript, other people did, too. You know the workshop saying that if you were bored writing it, your reader will be bored reading it? I think the same concept applies if a writer is smitten. I mean, can’t you tell when you’re reading about something a writer loves?

Also, revising toward what I loved in the manuscript made these elements bigger and more developed parts of the story, and a lot of what wasn’t working in the novel simply fell away. Finally, writing about and into what I loved helped sustain me through the long, and yes sometimes painful, drafting and revision process.

How about you? What do you love, in fiction or in life? What do your readers say is strong, beautiful, or pleasing about your writing? What if for just one draft or just one revision you focused on only those things? What opportunities might open up in your story? What shape might your manuscript take? What would that process be like? What would it feel like?

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My Murder by Katie Williams is available via Riverhead.