The Written Language Was Probably Invented to Torture You

Lately, I've found myself writing an awful lot. And not on my WIP, ifyannowhatimsayin.

Essay tests, essay answers, all hail our new essay overlords. Seriously, I've written so many of these that I've started having dreams about formatting Microsoft Word into 1.357" margins so that I hit seven pages.

And I have to say, the more essays I've written, the more I've noticed how similar they are to writing a story.

Seriously! So, you start out with this plan, and you should probably write down the plan and add footnotes and jenk, but of course you don't. You start writing, and you get totally lost, and you hit one page and look around like "dude why am i still writing".

Then you go through and re-read, and you see something that actually resembles a sentence a chimpanzee would not write by accident, and you capitalize on that. (Then you remember that you meant to capitalize, not make it all capitals. You ctrl-Z.)

Eventually you hit four pages and you're like man, I'm a freaking genius. Maybe I should go into this professionally. Be a teacher. I could churn out research papers like Shakespeare, and with way less plagiarism.

Then you hit page six.

NOOOOO you have one more page to go and the written language was invented solely to torture you. Why is this happening? Why did you go to college/high school/pre-k? Why did your parents have you in this time period? What was wrong with the Cretaceous period? Grunts and sighs are totally acceptable forms of communication.

No. Wait. You think you might... no, you definitely found a thread there that you can grab onto. You write and then... HOCRAP YOU HAVE AN ESSAY.



...




What, you don't write like that?

The Writing Process

Here is a sampling of a day in the life.

6:00pm - Realize I've written nothing all day.
6:05pm - Find Cinderella II A Stitch in Time on youtube.
6:15pm - Get tired of hearing Cinderelly sing about how awesome her life is and write 200 words.
6:30 - Watch Evil Stepmother get the magic wand and think that if Cinderella had just gotten the bluebirds to pluck her eyes out this never would have happened.
6:34 - Get embarrassed that I'm watching Cinderella II and pound out another 500 words.
6:50 - Recover from embarrassment. See Cinderella sneak off to the palace and think that this never would've happened in the original because it requires doing something. Decide I like Disney sequels.
6:55 - Hear another song composed by rabid squirrels and an organ monkey and decide otherwise.
6:57 - Write 1,000 words to avoid thinking about how my life has come to this.

So there you have it. That's my writing process (sub in other Disney sequels, the Twilight movies, L.A. Ink, or anything else bad/dramatic). What's yours?