The Pleasure and Pain of Writing

I’m finally done with business school applications. It was fun at first – reflecting on where I’ve been and where I want to go, but after writing, re-writing, editing, and re-editing the same thing a couple of times and then adapting it to different schools – it got pretty tedious. You can only eat the same meal so many times in a row before it all starts tasting like mush, and that’s what I felt like by the end of this process. However good I felt about my essays when I first wrote them, they tasted pretty dull last night when I did one last read before submitting. It might’ve been Chilean sea bass at one time, but yesterday it sure tasted like moldy PB&J.

But it did remind me of how much I love writing, the agony of the process, and the victory of emerging proudly with something original and (hopefully) interesting. There’s something personal about writing, the creation of something unique, that isn’t present in other disciplines. There’s something exciting about seeing ideas come together and reveal a deeper truth. It’s why I kept my essays from college and high school, but threw out my math tests and science lab write-ups.

Beyond that, writing is just so different from what I do at work every day. At work, I have a pretty good sense how long something will take me – drafting a strategic plan, building a financial model, developing a presentation. I might be a little faster or a little slower, but I can make a pretty good estimate – and as I work, I move inexorably forward, closer and closer to the goal. With writing, there is no such clarity or guarantee. I could be writing for two hours and be thrilled, or ten hours and be disappointed. Compelling ideas in an outline might develop awkwardly, and after writing and re-writing the same paragraph, I might still be standing in the same place. I tell myself that the dead ends and circles that I go around are part of the process and unavoidable, and that always makes me feel a little better…

In the end though, I’m glad I’m done – and now I can write what I want to write about! Now if only it wasn’t so difficult to get started…