Michael Eric Dyson is a wordsmith for sure. This quote (while a tangent from his Cornel West commentary on the New Republic website) captures the essence of writing in a way that I’ve never seen.
Writing is an often-painful task that can feel like the death of one’s past. Equally discomfiting is seeing one’s present commitments to truths crumble once one begins to tap away at the keyboard or scar the page with ink. Writing demands a different sort of apprenticeship to ideas…It beckons one to revisit over an extended, or at least delayed, period the same material and to revise what one thinks. Revision is reading again and again what one writes so that one can think again and again about what one wants to say and in turn determine if better and deeper things can be said.” ~Michael Eric Dyson
This, my friends, is why it takes so long. It sounds like a bit of a depressing process and honestly…it can be. It’s solitary. You question everything. When it’s fiction, your characters push you. Fear and frustration lingers between each syllable: how can I make this better? But for ya’ll, I do it again and again and again…
It reminded me of another popular quote from Walter “Red” Smith: “Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.”
Writer peeps, do you feel this way sometimes?