Picking the pen back up

For the past, oh, let's say a month, the first draft of my novel has stayed the same. No editing, revision, additions, or even subtractions have been made. Forty-four thousand seven-hundred and thirty-six words stared back at me last night as I opened the file on my desktop for the first time since early March. And that's when I realized it. It's time to pick the pen back up. Time to continue on.

You see, writing is easy. But writing well is a whole other animal. And writing something that someone else will want to read on top of that is extremely difficult. In fact, it's nearly impossible. Finding the motivation to pick up the pen again has been difficult with everything I've been going through. It wasn't easy, until I reminded myself that pain and sadness were the reasons I started writing in the first place.

Even the greatest authors struggled from time to time. It's been noted that James Joyce once spent ten hours crafting, perfecting two sentences for Ulysses. And Ernest Hemingway once told a friend that he loved having written, but he hated writing: it was too difficult, too draining, for him to truly love. So you see, I'm not alone, and that's comforting.