Writing is easy... right?

I'm envious of my colleague Miss C who, when she gets in extra early, can just sit down and begin writing with quick taps of her long, made-for-the-keyboard fingers.  But writing must be easy you scoff, after all if it weren't, how could we have so many books in the world?

Well I'll tell you how... 
See, those with the touch of genius can just do it like it's the most natural thing in the world.  They are fountains from which thoughts and feelings flow like rivers of truth wrapped in pretty stories.  For those of us who are less touched by genius, (hacks and others filled with their own hubris), well we tend to see the writing maxim more like this:  There's nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

I've got ideas you see.  Lots of them.  Pretty colorized be-ribboned ideas about characters and plots and settings and stuff.  A good writer will have things pop into their heads and make connections between ideas, characters, plots and places.  For me, notsomuch.  It's a bit more like a box you'd find left over from a jumble sale.  You open it and there's all this stuff that bulges and falls out in a mis-matched tangle.  And when a hack reaches for a character and matches it to a setting they think will work, you find these ingredients will decide they don't want to fit together.  And then everything starts fighting against you and your ideas.  So now it's a bloody boxing match between you, your character, your notions of where they belong, etceterra.  This goes on until all unite just to bitch-slap the sorry writer (me) who unfortunately thinks they know what they're doing when obviously they don’t!

I get how writing works.  I’ve read every book on writing a book that’s been published!  I know about plotting and pacing and outlining and tension and dialogue and hooks and stuff.  But alas there is one other thing that I lack, the missing ingredient.  Which is the necessary genius to bring these things together into a story that flows and sparkles and makes people beg to peer into more worlds from my imagination.

But someday… someday, I tell myself,  I’m gonna crack that nut!

So ever the optimist, let’s just keep going and see what happens.  And Karen – daisy girl, if you’re listening - please come back from your heavenly cloud and help me get your world, Silverhawk, into ours?

xx