I really do. It isn’t the part where I get to sit in a chair at my desk until my legs go numb. Or staring at a computer monitor until my pupils forget how to adjust and my eyesight goes all fuzzy. I don’t even enjoy holding a pen in my hand and making marks in a notebook until my hand cramps up.
Doing research and fact-checking can be interesting at times, but it can also be a boring, tedious chore. Naming my characters can be such a nightmare that it shuts down the whole works because I simply can’t write about someone until I know their name.
Trying to find the time to write can be disheartening in itself. I’m one of those people who feels so guilty about sitting down to write that I can’t do it until after I’ve done the laundry, washed the dishes, paid the bills and taken care of all my errands. I feel guilty because at some point in my life, someone convinced my subconscious that if I enjoy what I’m doing, it isn’t work, and therefore, I must do a whole bunch of icky things first, so I will “deserve” to do something I enjoy.
But when I do finally give myself permission to sit down and write, I love it. I love going into the depths of my subconscious and creating whole worlds out of thin air. I love creating characters, giving them personalities, and then complicating their lives…just so I can solve all their problems for them in the end.
I love injecting subtle hints into my prose and daring the reader to notice them. I love creating intricate webs of plot and subplot, leading the reader down one thread and then redirecting them to another. I love mixing humor with shock, empathy with horror, and real world issues with fiction.
I love reading back through my own words, with intent to find and correct errors…only to discover I was so absorbed in the story that I stopped looking for errors about five chapters ago. I love hunting for just the right word, just the right turn of phrase, that will have the desired impact, and then sitting back and noticing my heart is pounding because I hit myself right in the feelers with my own creation.
I love that in the midst of every day life, my muse will grab onto something mundane and spin it into a string of “what-if’s” that become story ideas. I love that an address I saw painted on a wall can inspire a whole series of story ideas. I love that I can take some of the worst moments of my life and turn them into fodder for fiction, which makes it all worthwhile.
I love that writing is the one thing I have always felt compelled to do, for as long as I can remember. And I love that I have finally given myself permission to do it…
S.R. Olson—Author 