Are experts wrong to say writing is hard? Write like bomb

Is writing really hard?

I think so, but if we practise it since our very childhood, it can get natural for us.

We rarely and very rarely feel a hurdle in talking. But if we’re asked to write what we talk, we’ll begin to feel an obstruction.

My daughter is of 2 years, and it’s a real struggle for her to speak. She hems and haws and gasps and checks herself multiple times before uttering 1 little broken word.

This is with all the children. But as they touch the age of 3, you can’t keep them from talking and twittering and cheeping about all those innocent nothings.

Do we ever tell them that talking is tough? That it’s meant just for a tiny privileged few? That they’ll have to be really lucky and talented and gifted to learn it?

No. Never.

But this isn’t so with writing.

Well-intentioned teachers and parents tell us that writing is terribly complex. In writing, they say, we need to care deeply about punctuating and spellings and all those cobwebby rules of semantics.

The result?

Writing feels tough. Damn tough. A real tortuous, hair-pulling task.

And yes, I feel that this probably is because since our childhood, from classes 3rd and 4th, we have been drilled and drugged with the idea that writing is something we need to learn, that writing is something tough, and we have to make ourselves accustomed to it.

Nobody ever told us that there’s a thing like talker’s block. Nobody ever told us that talking is a special skill, and therefore we need to learn it for years and years before getting fluent in it.

Talking for us is like walking or eating or doing any of those common activities…but this isn’t so with writing. We think that writing is something special, meant for a selected few, and we need to have natural instincts to master it.

This is one major reason why we get writer’s block. This is one major reason why we don’t get fluent in writing, and it’s this reason why we face so much friction in pursuing it.

Imagine if we were to write everything that we’re required to speak every day, how will we do it? Yes, if we’re not permitted to communicate without writing it down, then how well are we going to do it?

I think that then we’ll get very accustomed to writing. We’ll feel that writing is our second nature. After a month or so, when we’re convinced that we can’t talk anything except in writing, we’ll invent better ways to do it.

This is clear as a water stream during a bright day.

No hiding of the truth that I want to become a great writer. I want to write so well, so well that if someone reads my writing, he feels himself glued to it.

And I’m convinced that much of the improvement about to come in me is going to shoot forth from the story I tell myself about writing.

Shakespeare made his character Hamlet say, “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

I’ll borrow this sentence structure and say: There’s nothing tough or easy, but thinking makes it so.