Yeah, this is probably just me being cynical. But writing to me was kind of like a giant contradiction. Like a drowning swimmer, it's the fact that you know how to swim, you're a GOOD swimmer, and you swim regularly.... but you're drowning nevertheless due to some outside force. Maybe you got punted off a ship in the middle of a storm, maybe somebody hit you with a golf club into the water, maybe you're being chased by sharks. Either way, something you're good at normally now turns into this horrific experience of "Oh my god, I don't remember how to do this, how do I do this, oh god am I actually drowning?!"
Writing was kind of like that. We're all fairly accomplished students, plenty experienced in the English language. We have all the tools. We know how to write.
But the deadline's looming, time is crunching, and all of a sudden, all of that goes out the window. We look for ideas, try to plan, but the inspiration doesn't come. All of a sudden, writing becomes a horrendous chore as we try to pull out the words that we definitely do know but can't coherently link together in sentences anymore. Searching for the correct word, the correct phrase, the correct way to place these words.... all of this has gone. Inspiration is like the knowledge of how to swim - once that finally comes back, we've been flailing so long against our computer screens that we're out of energy and we're drowning because we're TIRED. As opposed to just drowning because you're panicking and can't swim. In this case, we're failing in our story because despite the fact we know what to write, despite the fact we know how to write it, it just doesn't come out because you can't dredge it out of your head because it's just pounding so much. You need bursts of inspiration, bursts of energy to get anything done, because now, it's kind of like weakly flailing in the water. Doggie-paddling? Treading water? You're wasting energy, the words come out as half-baked nonsense.
And then, once all those hurdles have been surmounted, you finally see a glimpse of land. Suddenly, everything you do has new fervor - the END is in sight. You swim faster, churning out whatever comes to you in the moment, rendering the ending a somewhat hastily-wrought but ultimately reflective of what you were thinking at the moment. There's a great sense of elation upon knowing that you got out alive, finished the story - succeeded. And in that elation upon finishing the work, you also forget how to swim or write. So your attempts at self-editing are met with vague glazing over and your mind telling you "Since you swam so much, of course you know how to swim!" OR basically, your mind is filling in the blanks for you and you find it hard to spot any errors because you're so self-assured by this point that since you survived, you must know how to swim = shuddup, I'm not missing words here.
Wow, this sounds pretty cynical.
Yeah. Okay.
SO TRUE!
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