Hardships.

            Some people think that writing isn’t really a profession or a “work”, it’s just a way to relax, to express your ideas on a paper. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that a person sitting on a couch or at the table and scribbling something in his notebook is actually doing some hard work. However, believe or not, writing as any other creative professions faces a lot of hardships and doubts.

The first difficulty is rather common for everyone who is making new things. It’s always hard to start. You have bright ideas, you have wonderful images in your mind, and you even have some neat words on the tip of your tongue. But you sit at the table, you look at the white blank page on the screen and you want to just run away as far as possible, you have millions of excuses and explanations why you can’t start today, this morning, now.  The first sentence and the first paragraph are the hardest ones – it’s what your work start from, it’s like a foundation of your building. After the first paragraph a reader makes a decision whether he continues reading or not. Most probably, this is not true, and in fact a reader goes through several pages before he forms his opinion of a book. But that’s how a writer feels – if you fail in the first paragraph, even only in the first sentence, you spoilt the whole book. That’s why the hardest moment for a writer is to pass this way from an intangible world of his imagination to a reality of words.

The second hardship is a writer himself. An essential point in writing is to make a book or a story interesting not only for a writer himself, it should be interesting and catching for a reader as we already discussed. It’s a true challenge to keep a balance between a presence of an author in the text and his obscurity at the same time. If author’s reflections are too vast and too personal, a reader would wonder why a writer thinks his personality is that interesting. If an author flaunts with his extensive knowledge in a certain field and simply cites scientific books and articles without any discussion, a reader would start yawning at the fifth quotation mark. Brevity is the soul of wit, but it should be meaty brevity.