Perhaps being a student is one way to sip from the long-searched-for fountain of youth. When I returned to school to get my MFA in creative writing, I was twenty-nine going on thirty. With none of the trappings of most of the women in my peer group—no mortgage, no marriage, no baby carriage—I was filled with age anxiety. Yet when we students piled around the long conference table with our professor, Laila Lalami, at the head, I felt as if I were a youth of ancient Greece studying at the feet of a great master. I was stunned, my mouth literally agape, when Lalami—the author of several books and a Pulitzer Prize finalist—casually commented that writing never gets any easier.
A decade later, having published a book myself, slogging away on a second, and staring down the deadline for this very article, I know what Lalami said to be true. For me writing is no treat. It’s another task at the end of a long day. It barges in on my free time, heavy with obligation. I fantasize about the lives of nonwriters, what it must be like to settle into a multi-hour viewing of a junky TV show with no thought toward the manuscript desperate for attention, no compulsion to write thrumming beneath every action. How free and light their shoulders must feel without the burden of writing the next great American masterpiece slung over them.
This past spring my misery led me to post on Facebook: “I really hate writing. It makes me so miserable. So it will come as no surprise to you that I have structured my entire life around it.” Nearly fifty people liked the post and a dozen commented on it, some to console and encourage me, others to opine. And so I had to ask the question: If so many of us are feeling this way when we write, why do we do it at all?
One writer who responded to my post was Tao Leigh Goffe, author of Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (Doubleday, 2025). Goffe chatted with me on Zoom about why writers are so wedded to the struggle. “When I saw your comment online, it reminded me of a moment of vulnerability,” Goffe said. She told me about how in 2021, during the pandemic, she sent off a casual tweet about how painful the writing process is. She compared it to an exorcism.
I repeated the word, zapped by its accuracy: “An exorcism.”
“Every time,” she confirmed.
A well-respected journalist responded to her harshly, saying something along the lines of “I feel so sad that you feel that way about writing. That’s just really sad.” The journalist seemed to have the attitude that finding the writing process to be anything other than an inherent joy was to be undeserving of the craft. (Perhaps this is not the way he meant it, but it is the way it landed when the story was retold to me.) Goffe said other writers came to her defense, but the exchange left her questioning whether writing challenged everyone in some form or another—emotionally, intellectually, and almost certainly financially. Is the pain that comes with writing equal to the vulnerability it requires of you? Maybe, to practice his craft, the journalist did not need to exercise the same degree of vulnerability that a creative writer does. But for Goffe, such vulnerability—and the emotional labor that vulnerability takes—are integral to her work. “I feel that the kind of writing I’m doing…is necessarily painful,” said Goffe. “Both cathartic and necessary.”
I asked Goffe if this is the case because of the difficult subject matter she deals with; Goffe said yes—but, as someone coming from the U.K., it’s also the colonial education system and the “rote rules of grammar” that accompany the King’s English that weigh on her as she writes. “How can one fully express themselves in the colonial language,” she asked, “especially when the colonizer is your colonizer?” I had not considered that there might be a price to be paid for attempting to make our thoughts and ideas legible in a language not intended for our use. “In a way I feel like [writing] is supposed to be uncomfortable,” said Goffe, “because it wasn’t made for us. It was made to subjugate us.”
When I began this essay, I thought it would be a tongue-in-cheek tale about writerly angst, but my conversation with Goffe left me wondering if writing is hard for me because it’s akin to passing my soul through a cheese grater: Must I move through an apparatus of pain if I want to make myself known through language, if I want to receive even a modicum of understanding in this life?
I turned next to Laila Lalami for more answers. When I reached out to her, Lalami’s schedule was stacked with TV appearances and events for her latest novel, the best-seller The Dream Hotel (Pantheon, 2025), but she was gracious enough to make time for her former student. She appeared on Zoom in a room bright with sunshine, and I asked her a follow-up question—ten years later—to a comment she casually tossed off in class: But why do writers voluntarily sign up for this strife?
“I actually ask myself that question, even with short-form writing,” said Lalami. “Like, I get a book for review, and I stare at the blank page. I’ve written dozens of reviews, and every time I face that blank page, I’m like, ‘Why?! What was I thinking when I said yes? How do I begin this?’ Always, I think, the misery is in the starting.”
Lalami explained that once the piece takes shape and you have a sense of where you’re going, the fun begins. “But that first part is the worst,” she said. Yet writers persist because there’s more than just misery afoot: “There is also the joy…in doing this thing that I love doing, which is to create and to think and be in solitude with myself.” And that joy can be nothing short of profound, affirming who we know ourselves to be.
I asked Lalami if our culture’s way of romanticizing the writer’s life contributes to practitioners’ dissatisfaction with the craft. She framed it as a class issue and concedes that it would be nice to lead a life in which your only concern is your book, and the payment of your bills is someone else’s task. But that’s not most people’s reality. “There’s no world in which you’re going to create the perfect conditions for you to write a book—like you’re going to win the lottery, and you’re going to move into this apartment in Paris, and you’re going to take long walks and sit at cafés, and you’re going to write this novel. Well, maybe it’s possible you might win the lottery, but it’s highly unlikely,” Lalami said. “And so, in the meantime, you actually have to sit down [and write the book].”
The latest season of Love Is Blind will simply have to wait, just as your writing has had to wait for you to wrap up your workday, sort the laundry, and file your taxes. Somehow after all of this, to ever get your book finished, you must coax a few more hours of productivity from your brain.
Lalami pointed out an additional source of our writerly angst: “People really imagine, [when] they look at a book as an object that is finished…that that’s how it comes to you. And actually it comes to you one sentence at a time.” This might be both good and bad news: “If you spend a couple of hours every day—and you write three or four sentences, but you do it every day—you will have that draft at the end of the year. It’s really the consistency.”
Writing, then, must be a daily devotion, not a someday dream. Surely, Serena Williams did not enjoy every gym session en route to becoming the greatest athlete of all time—and no reasonable person would. We don’t have to love every minute of our work. But maybe I could become a more prolific writer if I focused on remaining consistent rather than on my desired ascendency to greatness.
Finally, I turned to essayist and memoirist Natalie Lima for her insight. Lima has been just as open on the social media platform X as in our group chat about her relationship between sobriety and writing. Writers and drinking have a long, complicated history together, which adds to the angst of it all. I was once told that there are two kinds of writers: those who don’t drink and those who haven’t stopped drinking yet.
When I called Lima late on a weeknight, she was in her car headed home from a dinner with some of her sober friends. Earlier that day she posted to Instagram celebrating two years of sobriety. Her phone on speaker, she told me about an AWP panel she was on that she’d named “Perspective and Perseverance in Writing Sobriety: Hemingway Is Not the Only Way.” “I used to joke, how nice it would be if I could be…a Hemingway or a John Cheever, that I could just drink, drink, drink and I was still writing my magnum opus in the bar,” said Lima. “That will never be me.” Lima, like many writers, requires sobriety for the clarity that writing demands.
Lima gave me some advice for handling the bad vibes that often plague writers: “Whenever I’m having a pity party because the writing is not going well or I haven’t published in a while or I’m not getting a lot of attention like I want to…when I’m my best self, my most mature self, I tell myself, ‘Are you in the work? Are you spending time on the habits that create the art?’”
In Lima’s response I hear the echo of Lalami’s wise words on consistency. Lima also unknowingly called back to Lalami’s framing around the pushback against writers whining as a class issue. Lima asserted that no one working a blue-collar job or a “shitty nine-to-five” wants to hear your verbal tantrum about something you’ve elected to do. But Lima also noted, in defense of writers, that the work of writing is work. “Our society treats it as though it’s not real labor,” said Lima. “Everybody thinks they ‘have a book’ [in them]—but why doesn’t everybody have a book? Because it’s labor. That’s the irony of it.”
It’s often believed that since a public education teaches most of us the basic mechanics of writing, anyone is capable of doing it well. The low barrier of entry for the craft means the lines between hobbyist and professional grow blurry in ways that our visual arts peers don’t have to contend with. No one would liken their paint-and-sip masterpiece to the works of art hung on gallery walls, yet I once mentioned to a potential suitor I was a writer and he responded, “Me too! I do my church’s newsletter.”
Lima theorized that the reason writers stick with it despite what writing demands of us is that once you realize you’re good at this and you’ve decided it’s your calling—well, that’s it, there’s no turning back. “There’s a point early on in our writing journeys where it’s pure pleasure. I think it’s easy to forget that at its best moments, it’s pleasure. It’s the best high I’ve ever had.”
That high makes all the effort worthwhile. I experience that feeling when the act of creation transcends writing and becomes channeling, the creative spirit is merely passing through me. It’s what the novelist Edwidge Danticat described as serving as a “vessel” in a 2008 interview on University of California Television. “I think in all creative acts, you know, there’s a kind of magic or mystical thing that we don’t understand ourselves,” she said. I’ve lived this too, as have so many writers. Through writing, the closer I find myself to what cannot be understood, the better understood I feel. This is why the manufactured ease of capitalism’s many delights could never distract me from my writing indefinitely—even if it means some whining along the way.
Minda Honey is the author of the memoir The Heartbreak Years (Little A, 2023). She sends out a weekly newsletter about the writing life; read along at newsletter.writingforfakers.com.
