I Could Write A Book... If I Had The Time
Good morning beauties,
Yes, I know I took a mini-vacation from posting but I am back and feeling better than ever, in fact, I have some new content coming your way. Interesting, engaging and definitely things we’ve heard talked about before as well as some things I feel strongly about and ways I want to help my writing community and those just beginning their journey as a writer.
So let’s get started. So, the topic for today should be obvious as it is the title of today’s post. I hate this phrase for many reasons and I will share those below.
There are a few reasons why this phrase is actually wrong:
Writing a book is easy
Writing doesn’t take much time
Writing is the only skill you need to write
All you need to start writing is time
Writing is good
Doesn’t take much effort
Everyone knows how to write a book
This could not be further from the truth. This phrase basically explains how easy writing is to writers (and if you’re a writer then you know just how wrong that is). When in truth, writing a book is one of the hardest things a person can do.
Now, not only do they claim writing is easy, but they seem to think that while it does require time, it doesn’t require much, just the exact amount of time they don’t have to write a book. First of all, writing a book takes forever, if you were really a writer, or wanted to be one, or wanted to write a book you would know that. It takes, oftentimes, years to produce a good-quality book whether you’re an indie author or a traditionally published one. It takes years. That’s a lot of time to be doing something that you aren’t getting paid initially to do.
So many skills and time-consuming tasks go into actually writing, but are not directly part of writing, research being one, but learning is another and expanding your knowledge about writing and the different skills you need to be a good writer as well as knowledge about the world around you and ways you can expand on it or extend it to create your own worlds. You need to understand how a world works in order to create a world of your own that works well and makes sense. You also need to know the different parts of a story arc and characters arcs so you can make sure your story has each of them as they are all well-written and fit together smoothly and seamlessly.
there are many skills that you need to be a writer and they all take time to improve and grow and they take effort to improve and the desire to learn new things and improve them. This is no easy task, especially considering it takes valuable time away from your actual writing.
Now, while writing can be good and can even serve to increase your mental health, it can also deteriorate it at times. Though a lot of this comes from the negative feedback or negativity writers get for simply being a writer and having written and published something. There are many many issues that result from actively writing, writer’s block, imposter syndrome, fear, stress, anxiety and any number of things. These often stem from being told that we should be doing something else. But we keep working at this because it’s our dream, it’s what we want. But we’re being told how easy it is to do which makes us second-guess ourselves. ‘What if I’m the only one struggling to do this? I can never be a real writer if it’s this hard for me to write.’ This isn’t the case, every writer struggles. For example, I have finished writing 10 books (none are published yet) but I still struggle with the thought that I’ll never finish writing another book because it still feels impossible the next time I begin a new project.
Writing takes effort, skill and the desire to always improve and learn and hone your craft. The more you learn and the more mistakes you make, the better writer you become. If you don’t know something or don’t know about something do your research, the internet is amazing for bringing tons of information on any subject straight to your screen. Writers are excellent researchers and we look up everything we don’t understand. Writing is something you must continuously work at to improve and you must continuously improve all the skills that go into writing like grammar and spelling and vocabulary. Not to mention, the effort it sometimes takes just to make it to your laptop that day, especially if you’re having a shitty one. But we do it anyway.
While everyone does know how to write, in theory writing a book might seem easy, but actually executing the process of writing one is very difficult and time-consuming. That’s why writers constantly try to learn more about writing and how to do it better or after or easier and which way works best for them and how their mind works. Reading helps a lot in this way, most writers tend to read and they try to read as much as they can if they aren’t writing. Because reading other works by other authors who were successful enough to have their books published, can teach you things about what a book needs and how successful books are structured and what elements they contain. Writers are always learning, even if they arent actively writing or reading. We pay attention to our surroundings in order to pick up things we could potentially use later in a story.
Everyone does not, in fact, know how to write a book. Writing a book is not easy, it’s not always fun and glamorous, it takes a lot of dedicated hard work and we should celebrate the work that went into creating that thing you enjoy so much.
The only people who use this phrase are people who do not aspire to be a writer or an author and those who do not have what it takes to be one. They like to paint a beautiful picture of how easy writing is and how great it must feel to be a writer. But they don’t actually know and they won’t know because they refuse to realize that you don’t write a book in your spare moments. Real writers look at their schedule and find time that they can take away from something unnecessary and put writing in it’s place. Whether that be no video games after work, no Netflix or movies. No painting or sculpting, less reading because you have to write that book because you feel it pushing around inside your head, expanding and growing and you can’t stop thinking about it. It needs to be written and it’s demanding to be written. So you find time to dedicate to writing it because you must, not just because you want to. Being a writer is hard work. So let’s stop acting like it’s so easy that only writers have enough time to do it. No, a writer is the only one who will spend all their time doing it, if they could.
“You cannot write a book if you had the time. But you will write a book if you make the time.” That’s what the phrase should say.
Thank you so much for hanging out, this was such a fun post to work on! I really enjoyed it! I’m super passionate about the wrongs against writers. So let’s set some of them right.
Lots of love! Happy reading and writing writers! Let’s show them how wrong they are. Until next time.
Celine Rose Marie