Member-only story
Why Writing Is Hard Work
My process for unraveling the puzzle of writing.
I was the worst writer in college.
Flowery language. Endless adverbs. Vague sentences. I could care less about writing. I wrote the assignment, submitted it, and was out. I can hear my professor now:
“Hey Ben, write a five-page essay on how German political theory influenced American politics in the 1980s to 1990s.”
Me: “No thanks. I’ll pass.”
The biggest reason I believe writing is hard is because we don’t know why it’s hard. We think of writing as this mystery that’s impossible to decipher.
This is how I’ve learned to understand it.
You Have to Explain Your Ideas On Paper
Most startups have good ideas. They don’t have good execution. Until they have a pitch deck, you don’t really have a startup. You have an idea that you bounced around with family and friends.
Writing is the same way. Everyone has cool ideas they want to write about until they actually write about it.
You can read about ideas. You can talk about it. But writing about it forces you to explain it in a detailed way that makes your brain implode or explode. You have to craft hooks, sentences, and…
