This blog is dedicated to discovering, bit by bit, what the writing process is all about. What communicating means. How we can do communicate better. And how we can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

Sometimes writing catches fire and illuminates.

Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone who suffers more in writing than other people.

A paradox, for sure. We might well think that writers are born, not made. That they rise up out of pure air flaming with the perfect words, phrases, sentences. That nothing they touch need be retouched.

But, as Mann suggested, this is usually far from the truth.

Writers become writers for various reasons. Some to pursue fame. Some to make money. Some simply to express their ideas as clearly as possible. But all share a preoccupation with craft. It’s not merely what they say that counts, in other words, but how they say it.

So much for mere “content providers,” as if all writers had to do was shovel mass quantities into a box.

In fact, good writers all take pains to say well what they say because, without these pains, there’s no proper way of saying it.

But for writers, the pains lead to pleasure. Writers must sit down daily, making writing a discipline, so the words and thoughts flow freely. They flow, in fact, so freely that the pain gives way and the pleasure builds.

A day without writing becomes painful. A day that’s not recognized in some written form or other.

More later about how discipline builds pleasure. The important thing at this point is to assert that practice and discipline can have this gratifying, and productive, result.