Writing and Laying Bricks
Writing is work. Sometimes it’s scary-hard work.
But, like all work, it doesn’t happen until you do it.
Sit down.
Fingers on the keyboard.
Words on the page.
Laying cement blocks is also hard work. Like writing, bricklaying doesn’t happen until you lay your string lines, build a mortarboard, and start laying bricks.
There are many similarities between writing and bricklaying.
Writing is scarier.
When laying bricks you know where you’re going. You have a pretty good idea of what the structure is going to look like when you’re finished. There’s a rhythm to bricklaying. It’s like a good blues album. Set your lines, grab a brick, scrape the mortar, set the brick, pound the brick, smooth the mortar, grab a brick.
There can be a rhythm to writing.
Most of the time is the annoying, staccato, vexatious sound of post-modern jazz.
Writing should be brick by brick. (Or Bird by Bird, according to Anne Lamott.) But my rhythm is often brick, research, distraction by research, boredom, excitement, anxiety, despair and dread, another brick, I don't know what I'm doing.
This is because we often don’t know (or understand) the final results.
I often don’t know what a blog post will resemble before I begin. And even when I do have some idea, the finished product often looks very different from the original idea.
That’s the nature of writing.
That’s why writing is not just hard work.