Dear Writing, It’s Complicated

By Mae Paulson

Author of The Bug and the Bee - The Case of the Missing Pie

Some days, writing feels like falling in love for the first time. The words pour out like they’ve been waiting centuries to be heard, the world blurs around me, and I’m convinced that this is what I was born to do. Other days, writing is… well… a toxic situationship that I keep crawling back to. It stares at me with that smug blinking cursor, daring me to say something worth keeping. And I keep trying, because apparently I’m a glutton for punishment.

I have fallen into a rhythm:

• Highs: Coffee-fueled 2 a.m. downloads, dialogue that strikes like lightning, scenes that make me cry in my own kitchen. Those rare moments where the story feels like it’s writing itself and I’m just lucky enough to hold the pen. The month that I wrote two short stories that I adore. My hands and back ached but I couldn’t stop. The stories were rushing out of me, each sentence like a spark on dry grass catching fire before I had time to think.

• Lows: Days where I hate every sentence I’ve ever written, including my grocery list. Days where each word feels like dragging a boulder uphill. Days where I wonder if I should’ve taken up pottery or knitting instead. The time that I deleted 25,000 words because I hated all of it. I stared at the screen as I deleted an entire universe, feeling like I tore out a part of my soul.

Sometimes I swear I’m quitting. And I mean it. I’ll clean the house, watch a show, reorganize the bookshelf alphabetically and by color just to avoid coming back to writing. And for a few hours, sometimes even weeks, I almost believe myself.

But then there’s this moment. One single sentence that clicks into place like it’s been stuck in my brain all along, and I’m done for. Hooked. Back in love.

Writing is brutal. It’s beautiful. It’s a long-distance relationship with terrible reception, full of miscommunications, missed signals, and occasional love letters that make it all worth it. 

It’s an endless dance between despair and delight, a back-and-forth that keeps me up at night for entirely different reasons depending on the day. It is both the easiest thing in the world, when the words come, and the hardest thing I have ever done, when they don’t.

Writing has been my safe place, my (virtual) therapist, my confessional booth. It’s where I have buried heartbreaks, resurrected hope, rewritten endings that I didn’t get a chance to have in real life and dreamed of new beginnings that I didn’t know I needed.

So, dear writing, I’ll keep showing up. Even when you’re distant. Even when you’re cruel. Because for all the heartbreak, you give me something nothing else can, the rush of creating a world that didn’t exist before I touched the page. And if that’s not love, I don’t know what is.

Maybe you have your own version of this, something that drives you mad and keeps you sane at the same time. If you do, then you already understand.

Love, an author who should probably be in couples therapy with her manuscript.

Mae Paulson

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