Writing is Easy

 The title of this blog is from my favourite quote about writing, by newspaper reporter Red Smith, although it is sometimes attributed to others, including Ernest Hemingway. The full quote is 'Writing is easy... just open a vein and bleed.'  So, really, writing isn't easy at all--or if it seems easy sometimes, it can also be painful, messy, dispiriting, and thankless! Which begs the question why anyone dares to do it at all... the answer to that, I usually find, is that writers can't not write (sorry for the double negative, writers, but in this case it works!).  When we write, we give of ourselves. We lay our intimate thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears, longings and dreams, completely bare, even if they're cloaked in the thin disguise of a story--whether that story is science fiction or suspense, romance or historical or anything in between any of those. It's still essentially us, which is why writers can sometimes seem a little thin-skinned about their pr...