The Best and Worst Parts of Writing

by Ox Huizing
self-proclaimed professional analyzer and over-thinker, English degree drop-out and coffee connoisseur

The best part of writing is being read. 

Right?

But the worst part about being a writer is the anxiety and worry that comes with wanting what you wrote to actually be read. The fact that every single writer is both driven and tormented by a phantom of an unknown, and possibly merely imagined, audience is something that lingers on the peripheral of my mind every time I set pen to paper. Why exactly would we set ourselves up for the inevitable torture of knowing that people might read what we wrote and remain untouched? Or possibly, an even worse outcome when it comes down to it, remain indifferent to it? For all we know, readers may be ignorant to the fact that some impulse drove us to devote all of our attention to setting our thoughts down in a way that we hope would elicit a reaction that is in line with our intentions of writing in the first place. 

Do readers understand what a writer is? That we are tortured souls, haunted by elusive words and uncategorizable feelings? Readers come in all shapes and sizes, while writers mostly fall into one of two categories: Those who write for the love of it, and those who write in order to be read. And if every writer is honest with themselves, we’ve all been on both sides of that coin. In one moment writing fitfully just to empty our brains of the thoughts and inspirations that fill us with an unending moment of sheer joy or pain, with no regard towards how sloppily or clumsily we throw words at a page. And in the next, carefully crafting each phrase, each sentence, each punctuation until it is Just. About. Perfect. Not just perfect for us, but perfect for those whom we would like to be perfect for.

This scratching, pestering thought that what I write should be worthy of whomever would dain to read my writing has paralyzed me more often than I’d care to admit. After all, I’ve been a writer for years. Decades, even. Never mind the years that slipped by without me drafting a single poem or journal entry. Let’s not get hyper focused on the little details. But it came to my attention, while working on one of the half-dozen “books” I have started and stored on my ump-teenth laptop, that I wasn’t writing anything simply because I wanted to write. I hadn’t been overcome by the irresistibility of a story or the metamorphosis of a character plaguing my thoughts. I’m familiar with those feelings and was therefore able to recognize the lack of them. 

No, I wasn’t writing for the love of the thing, or for the thrill of the discovery of a plot or  characters I was trying to bring to life on the page. I was writing, or more correctly, FAILING to write because my focus was on something ahead and out of reach. I was writing in order to be read. I was drafting and then editing, a tug of war going on inside of me: If I wasn’t writing to be read, why would I write? But if I wrote to be read, was I actually writing what I wanted to write? (Let’s be honest—I’ve stopped and edited this piece probably a dozen times by now. It’s a habit now.)

I wasn’t thinking about the story as it unfolded before me. I wasn’t carried by the warm current of life and laughter and drama and creativity that flows from heart to fingers to pages to the world. I was forcing my fingers to bang out words that I hoped I could sculpt into something that would capture not only the readers’ attention, but their approval. And this, I found, robbed me of the joy of writing for the love of it. This drive and focus, however vague or buried it was within my mind, became a wall that I continuously slammed my head into as I tried to force story after story out of myself. It was useless. It would never work. But it also refused to leave my mind. 

I WANT people to like what I write. I WANT to inspire and to amuse and to challenge people. But writing with that as the goal was somehow sapping the life and joy out of my writing. I would get stuck in the cycle of over analyzing each word and phrase, tearing sentences and characters apart as if their very lives mattered little to me, their creator. They were objects to whom I could do what I pleased; I had created, and therefore I could destroy. Like some mellow-dramatic demigod who had just realized that everything he did was futile and why not burn everything to the ground if that was the ultimate fate of the world anyway?

And then the circle was completed in my mind, as the anxiety and worry and frustration that had been plaguing me melted like a dew. The realization that the reader might not know what exactly a writer goes through, so why not write for the writer instead? Why not, instead of wanting to be read, I wrote what I wanted to write? For as a reader myself, I was indeed a writer who understood the most important reader. And as a writer, I would please the reader of these words. It was as if my tormentor turned out to be my friendly ghost, a guide and a whisper of what writing should be. I could release the desire of wanting to be read by anyone else—I would not be unmoved. I would not be indifferent. I could love every word I set to paper, and mold and sculpt it however I damn well felt like. 

I was the reader of the writer, the writer for the reader. The worst and the best part about being a writer.