eWriteLife Blog

The Scene:

Imagine being interviewed on national television, because your first book has just become a runaway bestseller.

The show has gone pretty well, and now the host turns to you for the final question.

“Not all of us are writers,” she says, “So can you please tell the rest of us — what does writing feel like?”

You put on a smile. You face the camera. And you answer: “Writing is like…”

The Responses:

Writing is like using a pen to dip into my deepest and most interesting thoughts, and ‘painting’ them on paper, like an artist does a landscape.

Everyone reads these words, and gets something different from them. Each person is touched in a unique way. I experience such joy just knowing that my words may change a life, even if it’s just in making someone’s day a little brighter.

From: Marilyn

Writing is like… memories… only putting to paper
your thoughts so others will enjoy them.

From: Florence Brick

Writing is like…

waking up in the morning by the singing of the birds,
witnessing a rainbow after a heavy rain,
sitting by the fireplace in winter while holding a
glass of brandy and watching the snow falling.

Writing is like…

a pregnant woman as she is aware there is life within
herself, the feelings of excitement and anxiety that
we experience when we face something new…

Writing is awakening.

From: Cinti
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Writing is like a balloon in your head, and someone starts squeezing it and squeezing it, and when it finally pops all that pressure is gone and a beautiful story is left.

– Shaun O’Brien

Writing is a river flowing in an undetermined direction, yet in one path. The river picks up everything it can carry, as a writer writes all the thoughts that come to him.
– Yared Negussie

Writing is like having a carrot in front of you, dangling at the end of a long stick — the carrot is your book; the stick, the obstacles you go through to write that book. If you are a writer,
you don’t just chase the carrot and give up. Instead, you chew the stick to reach the carrot. And you’ve got your book.
– Shery Ma Belle Arrieta

Writing is like my therapist, I can tell everything.
– Elizabeth Schmidt

Writing is like opening the gates of a huge ancient dam, and letting the water, penned up for ages, full of potential but having no outlet, loose, to roar over the spillways and down through the valley, a force of nature, irresistable, sweeping great rocks of ego and resistance before it.
– Mark Ray

Writing is like putting all my eggs, scrambled of course, into one basket, and serving them to you on a plate for digestion.
– Judith Lantz

I feel like I will explode if I am not able to see on paper the things that are important to me.

Sometimes it is the wonderful sense of awe I feel when I see our angelic, wide-eyed little girl sees something for the first time, and I wonder if I also had that same wonderment but allowed adulthood to cloud my memory.

Other times it is the fear I feel when the phone rings late at night and I feel my heart do a skip wondering if my grown son is okay or if the street has claimed one more loved one.

What ever it is that is in my head seems to scream to be put in writing so that maybe someone will know my thoughts.
– carla

Writing is like going over the edge of a steep hill on a toboggan. You think that you’re going one place but you usually wind up in another.

Writing is like going for deep psychoanalysis. It’s very therapeutic. And it’s more fun than the average Joe can imagine.

I think everyone should be a writer.
– Gene Woolcott

It’s like running through the woods, real fast. You kind of know where you’re going, but things keep popping up in front of you, to the side of you. You duck and you dodge, weave and bob, and maybe you make it out alive. You might even get to where you thought you were going in the first place.
– anthony zenkus

It’s like taking your heart, your feelings, your soul, tearing them out, and putting them on display for all to see, or to destroy.

It is an exhilarating feeling.
– Anson Smith

It feels like drowning in your thoughts and ideas and then when you finish you come up for air.
– Sara Porter

It’s really like a love affair. When the writing comes to me easily, like when things are going right between two lovers, it’s heaven. And when he goes away, like when I get writer’s block, you miss him terribly and want him back with you.
– jhoanna calma

It’s like being an actor whose craft must be meticulously studied if it is to appear real, and yet has to maintain complete spontaneity. It is the balance, the interchange, of instinct and form that makes up brilliance.
– Melanie Alford

Writing is like drowning. Ideas and fears and fragments swarm around you, pulling you under. Each word that you write is a stroke, some strong and some weak, but all of them are pulling you out of the morass, and back onto dry land.
– kimberly skopitz

The need to write is like the need to be fed: You will not be satisfied until you are nourished.
– jbur641500

Writing is like a child with a yo-yo, the more you play around with it, the more you can do. You develop your own style and are able to captivate an audience with tricks. Ultimately the goal is for people “around the world” to admire and assess the
stylized work. Unfortunately, most of us writers find inspiration while “walking the dog.”
– Jason Frye

It’s an adrenaline surge rushing through your body. You have this spark of an idea that keeps threatening to burst into flames and you have to get the words out on paper to match this emotion or picture in your head. After this comes the work of cleaning up the mess that you made.
– Janet West

Writing is complete and unbridled control over the uncontrollable: the land and its weather, people and their thoughts, feelings and actions. I could tilt the universe on a whim, its fate in my possession. Writing is a drug, a rush, a therapy.
– Nicole Alexander

Writing is a force of nature.

Life, a new reality, is created with each stroke of
your pen.
– jacqui p

There’s freedom in the written word that is limited only by your own self-judgment.
– Mary

Writing is like going to a relative’s house, because it can be fun if you want it to be. At a relative’s house you can play games and talk and enjoy it or you can sit and pout and be a bum. In writing you can reach deep inside yourself and let your emotions out or you can just think it is boring and it will be no fun at all.
– Tom Foster

Writing is like sharing your deepest thoughts with a friend. The paper is your friend and you can share anything with it and know it will be confidential. It is like putting your thoughts under lock and key.
– Merlin

Writing is like a cold glass of lemonade on a hot summer day.
– andy

Writing is like a dove flying in the wind. The wind is the ink, and the clouds are the paper. As the dove flies through the clouds with the wind beneath its wings it makes sweet, sweet stories and poetry.
– Andy Tirevold

Writing is like tubing behind a boat because you are always bouncing around and in writing you bounce around looking for ideas and things to write about.
– Carla Tate

Writing is like life. There are good times when everything seems to just flow and there are bad times when I feel the well has run dry and wonder why I do this.

There’s a risk in being a writer. Security is not there most of the time, but fears are.

Will I have enough money for the bills by making this my profession? Will I be appreciated or scorned? Am I willing to open my heart and soul to my readers and share who I am and what I believe despite any anticipated criticism?

In the end, though, I could be nothing else but a writer because ignoring the rewards as well as the fears, a writer is who I am.

Writing allows me to transcend and be totally authentic which is what we all seek in this life to be fulfilled.
– Angie

Writing is like trying to mend an antique quilt when you don’t know how to sew. Writing is like trying to take the ever-shifting landscape of your mind and trying to pin it down. Writing is like mining through the wasteland of your soul for the few worthwhile pieces that need to be shared.
– WendyVeith