The problem with writing

The curse of perfectionism is perhaps the single biggest stumbling block as I put pen to paper. Every time I receive a writing assignment, I am initially excited, and set about lining up interviews, visiting places if required, doing Web research and jotting down words or phrases that I think will make the final product "pop" - that is, give it an extra oomph.

But then, when the deadline looms, I sit in front of the computer, dashing off one lead after another, agonisingly (notice how my spelling is erratically British; that's because the publications I write for now stick to British English) unable to commit to a single lead, a single approach.

This process will generally take at least an hour. More often, three hours have passed before I am happy with the way the article begins.

Which means that any single article, even if it is just 500 words, will take me the better part of the day.

It may be that for those of you who write for a living (or who just love to write) a lot of the work will already have been done by the time you type the first word to an essay, a short story, or magazine article. You'll have massaged your ideas into some semblance of shape. That wonderful alchemical process will already have taken place in your brain. And sometimes when I am lucky this happens to me also. But more frequently, for me the story becomes a story only in the very act of writing. Out of nowhere it seems, the words come, phrases arrange themselves, and new ways of saying things spill out of god knows what dark creative caves in my mind. But it only starts to happen when I am actually picking out the letters on the keyboard. It's a though I need the visual cues, the shape, the curves, the architecture of the letters themselves, the spaces and punctuation to give birth to thought.

This birthing, it is tedious. I come to it with dread. I delay it and delay it. I fix up the house, rearrange my closet, wash a few dishes before I can bring myself to sit down and write. And yet nothing, almost nothing else I do in my working life, gives me greater pleasure. I do not yet write fiction (although I feel there is at least a few essays and maybe a short story and a poem in me), but feature writing, journaling, and even the most mundane of blog posts keep something in me alive.