Walter "Red" Smith

"There is nothing hard about writing. All you have to do is sit down and open up a vein." - Walter "Red" Smith

Walter Smith is absolutely right in what he is saying, in more ways than one. Writing, in a sense, is extremely easy. Writing well, on the other hand, is an entirely different story. Anyone can sit down and throw words on a page and then call them art. To create a masterpiece, a mirror image of yourself that you would be glad to claim ownership to, is infinitely harder.

Being a writer, though, admittedly, an extremely amateur one, I understand where he is coming from. Writing with inspiration can be easy, as well. When writing is your job, something that you are, in fact, required to do, it becomes a grueling task. To sit down and make yourself write is similar to sitting down and opening up a vein. You sit there and bleed openly onto the pages, pouring your heart and soul into them hoping that, maybe, one day someone will appreciate the words you slaved over. This is another sense in which he is correct.

The third, and final sense, is the process of criticism. With writing comes reviewing and with reviewing comes criticism. When you hand someone a piece of your own writing, a piece of your heart, a piece of your mind, it is inevitable that there is something that they will find wrong with it. Perhaps they find your characters, the ones that you carved from hard marble to be the warm creatures they transformed into, to be flat and boring. Perhaps they hate your plot, the one that you tossed and turned in your hand a thousand times over, trying to make it just right. Perhaps they actually just hate your writing. Your writing is a part of you, a direct reflection of you, in most cases. This means that they might as well just hate you. In writing, you open yourself to this criticism, and thus you open up your veins, letting the crimson flow in pain as you watch what you have created be torn to pieces by the hands of a stranger.

Yes, Mr. Walter Reed, you have hit the nail on the head. Writing is letting yourself flow onto the very pages that you work on. Writing is the deceivingly simple task of throwing yourself into the black and white world of words and phrases. Writing... can be pain.