The writing process can feel like pulling teeth sometimes, but why is that the case?
From the tortured genius author stereotype to students dreading their upcoming term paper, the myth that writing is a painful process is a very common one. A lot of us can vouch for this myth from our own experiences, but before we judge this myth, we need to take a look at what can make writing so troublesome for us.
Navigating complicated, inconsistent grammar rules and trying to make a reader understand your intentions are the real challenges that all writers face. All writers handle these challenges differently and find ways to cope with the difficulty of trying to communicate around all these barriers.
Even some of the best writers have been known struggle with the writing process, but why does so much of the writing process seem so painful.
To answer this question, we’re going to brush up against Freud’s territory. Our earliest memories of writing seem to have some bearing on how we grow up viewing writing.
For a lot of people these early memories are bad ones. It could be some overly harsh criticism of a second-grade paper or maybe a Bart Simpson style punishment of writing “I will not steal the class pet” 100 times, but the point is that those bad memories of writing stick with us longer than we realize.
Our previous experiences with writing can account for some of the pain in the writing process – like why some people want to tear their hair out at the thought of an essay while others, cool as a cucumber, get right to work planning.
As we said, prior experience is one of the foundations of how we write and, since all of our experiences are different, the way we write is also different. One neat thing about bringing our prior experience into our writing is that it lets us cut some corners. When we start in on a familiar assignment, we can (sometimes subconsciously) use prior experience as a guide. This can become a problem, though. When we bring our previous experience into a new project sometimes our old habits don’t quite fit the new project and we get a poor result.
Unfortunately, we’re set up for a lot of those poor results. Schools continue to set up writing classes as a means to meet criteria for district, state, or nationwide performance standards, despite that people’s processes have so much natural variation.
It’s also no surprise that after dealing with assignments that pigeonhole students into particular processes, five-paragraph essays, and dense rubrics , we’re burned out on writing by the end of high school and 100 level college English classes.
Having built up a mountain of unpleasant prior experience, it’s unfortunately easy and commonplace for the writing process to become painful.
I think we have to call this myth plausible. With all the variety in people’s processes and experiences and all the common-core, standardized writing education at odds with that variety, I don’t think there’s any doubt writing can be a painful process.
