Writing Is Strange and Scary

Writers who struggle are everywhere. Here's a knitting writer in Toronto who has as much trouble with her fourth book as her first. [Interesting that this has not made her want to quit!] Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, author of At Knits' End and Knitting Rules! and affectionately known as the Yarn Harlot, titled her recent post Easy as Pie:

Book writing is strange and scary. You can't tell how long you're going to have to do it, what time you're going to finish, if it's going to be alright when you do finish, or if you're going to spend 3 hours dragging 500 words out of your brain only to look at them, realize 467 of them are complete crap and hit the delete key as you sob for the 14th time because you're going to need to find a way to carve another 3 hours out of your responsibilities as a mother, probably so that you can write more complete drivel that no-one would ever like to read, knowing the whole time that your deadline is running out while you ponder that you've made an enormous mistake and really should go to work in a factory, where at least you can tell if you're getting something done and no-one tells you your punctuation is crap and it doesn't matter if you're not funny. The more I write, the more I worry. Will this work? How will it work? Are we out of orange juice? Is that a complete sentence? Am I procrastinating? Do I suck? Where's my knitting?

Stephanie doesn't pull any punches about how hard she finds writing, and I appreciate her honesty. The more I read about the writing life, the more I realize that I'm looking for myself in other writers. Trying to find people who have the same joys or woes so I can say, Ah, yes, that's me, I must be a writer, I must be on the path.