Why write? Writing is hard.

Why I write anyway.

As a little boy, I’d wake up and slip downstairs. If I was first, I'd tiptoe across the creaky living room floor in route to the front door. From there, I could peer out the narrow glass pane and catch sight of the daily newspaper. If it was damp outside, the paper would be folded over and covered in an orange bag. But I liked it best when it was dry. Then, it was rubberbanded. I’d open the door. Just a crack, usually, and, confronted by the elements, I’d snatch the paper. Peeling the rubber band off the paper started the process of getting covered in some amount of ink. Very often I would hold the paper close to my nose as I unfolded it. There was something about the newsprint on that paper. It’s a bit like a new book, a fresh pack of baseball cards, or even a new plastic CD. I smelled my hands, too. The ink on my skin — a smudged tattoo — was a reminder of my fleshly humanity.

Unfurling the paper, a world opened before my eyes — in color on the front page and black and white inside. Stories from far and near. Unusual and strange stories and some that made you feel good about being human. Odd classified ads and superstar high school athletes.

As I got older, I picked up the neighborhood newspaper route. Rising at 4:45am each day had its drawbacks, as did the snow and soaking rain, but I did learn something about hard work and constancy. I came to know most everyone on the street, largely by knocking on their doors to collect their newspaper fees each month. The biggest perk of the route came in the form of scoping the news before anyone else on the street even thought about getting up.

I’ve labored over these details to set up the fact that I studied journalism when I first got to college. At the time, the world of communications was being turned on its head. Web 2.0 had just arrived. During my freshman year of college, for example, John Carroll University managed to get enough student signatures to warrant a Facebook. I remember exuberant college kids buzzing around on campus, pumped about the new social media possibilities that popped out of our screens. Not only that, we had high speed internet access in each dorm room. The days of the daily newspaper were numbered. But not before I was somehow introduced to an ancient journalist from The Plain Dealer. To this day, I have no idea who the man was. He was kind to me and encouraged the my 18-year-old self to work hard and hone the craft of writing. That was 21 years ago. I’ve still remember that conversation, and I’ve still got a long way to go.

He recommended I read On Writing Well by William Zinsser. I chased down the book and have read it cover-to-cover multiple times since then. Given that I’m a melancholic prone to melancholy, I’ve always appreciated the opening pages of the book. There, Zinsser explains how hard writing is, at least for him. He recounts an experience where a school in Connecticut offered a "day devoted to the arts," where he (a professional writer) and a "Dr. Brock," a surgeon who had recently taken up writing, were invited to speak. Dr. Brock explained that writing was easy, that it just flowed, and when it didn't, he took a walk. He didn't care much for editing, but for letting it be. Zinsser stated that writing was hard and that rewriting and rewriting the rewritten text was more important than writing it the first time. He expressed the pain of working through "stuckness" and that there wasn't time for long walks or boat rides for the professional writer with deadlines.

I tend to align with Zinsser. I think writing is hard, too. But, because it’s hard, it’s thrilling. Excellence evades my grasp. Writing reminds me of trying to master the left-handed layup (as a righty), stretching your fingers for a bar chord, or actually time up all the parts of a meal for once. It’s also thrilling because it’s difficult and I’m usually up for a good challenge. Some people love having run or having written. I like that feeling of accomplishment, too. But, I also appreciate the process, painful and tedious as it may be.

Back to Zinsser. He relates that learned a great deal from the experience and concluded that there are probably as many methods and approaches for writing as there are people who write. But, all writers are, as Zinsser describes:

Vulnerable and all of them are tense. They are driven by a compulsion to put some part of themselves on paper, and yet they don't just write what comes naturally. They sit down to commit an act of literature, and the self who emerges on paper is far stiffer than the person who sat down to write. The problem is to find the real man or woman behind the tension. Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.¹

Here, I think Zinsser nails it. The humanity piece, perhaps more than the craft piece, makes writing hard. It makes writing what it is. Writing exposes and renders vulnerable the writer. Nothing ever comes out quite right. Nothing appears on paper as you imagined it would. The fundamental incommunicability of the human person confronts the writer. So it becomes a fight, really. An internal one. A desire to be heard and known and accepted, and the frightful prospect of being heard and known and rejected.

Dorothy Day picks up on this element of writing, which she describes as a confession:

Going to [the Sacrament of] confession is hard. Writing a book is hard, because you are "giving yourself away." But if you love, you want to give yourself. You write as you are impelled to write, about man and his problems, his relation to God and his fellows. You write about yourself because in the long run all man's problems are the same, his human needs of sustenance and love. "What is man that Thou art mindful of him?" the Psalmist asks, and he indicates man's immense dignity when he says, "Thou hast made him a little less than the angels." He is made in the image and likeness of God, he is a temple of the Holy Spirit. He is of tremendous importance. What is man, where is he going, what is his destiny? It is a mystery. We are sons of God, and "it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God." I can write only of myself, what I know of myself.²

Forget a book. Writing anything is hard. And it is hard because it demands something of you, the writer. It demands yourself. Nothing more. Nothing less. (Perhaps this is why I feel AI generated writing is such a travesty, like Daniel Tiger is to Mister Rogers. AI short circuits the human work involved in self-expression. On the flip side, it also strips away the other, another human being who is reaching out in some way to his reader, with the hope of communion. A computer cannot connect in this personal, relational way.)

Writing is an interpersonal reality. St. Augustine picks up on the tension involved. He describes the dynamism of communication as follows:

The sound of my voice brings the meaning of the word to you and then passes away. The word which the sound has brought to you is now in your heart, and yet it is still also in mine...The sound of the voice has made itself heard in the service of the word, and has gone away, as though it were saying: My joy is complete. Let us hold on to the word; we must not lose the word conceived inwardly in our hearts.³

Speaking contains a certain immediacy. The listener is right there (generally), and the experience of resonance simultaneous. When I write, however, part of myself, my voice, hangs out there. It awaits a hearer, a listener, a reader, in whom my voice carrying the word will be received and cherished. Communication, communion, only happens when that happens. And most writers don’t know when and if that ever happens. Conversely, this is exactly what happens inside of me when another’s written voice carries the word into me, and there is connection and resonance. At the bottom of it, I think this fueled my fascination with the daily newspaper. It wasn’t so much whatever the news was or that I saw it first, but that through the miracle of mass media, writers reached out and I could receive what they had to say, and receive them in the process. Obviously this wasn’t something I consciously thought about, but something I felt. In fact, I still do, anytime I come across that antiquated thing called a newspaper inviting me to take up and read.

Madeleine Delbrêl’s biographers explain that “writing was, for her, a harmony of prayer and action.” They note that “prayer was the main axis of her life, because she wanted to go constantly to the source of love who is Jesus Christ.” Consequently, “when she wrote,…it flowed from a conversation with God.”⁴ I think this observation gets at something true for me, though I don’t come close to writing from the depth of prayer we see in people like Delbrêl or Day, namely the relationship between writing and prayer. Pray and write. Ora et scribe. Ora et labora. Writing is work. Writing expresses prayer. I pray to make an attempt at loving God — and neighbor too. I suppose I write for similar reasons. Prayer binds God, neighbor, self. Writing does, too. Prayer sources writing with a love capable of carrying across the void and, perhaps, into the heart of my reader. I suppose I write because I pray, and I pray simply because I have to, or else something in me dries up and dies.

1. Zinsser, On Writing Well, 5.

2. Day, The Long Loneliness, 10.

3. Augustine of Hippo: Sermo 293,3.

4. François, Pitaud, and Jacobi, “Biography of Madeleine Delbrêl,” in The Dazzling Light of God, 16–17.