Sometimes the writing process is easy. Sometimes it feels like breaking bones.
I wrote a feature about Yahoo! last month. Once I figured out its spine – the central idea – the writing flowed smoothly after.
The feature I just finished about Steve Jobs was hell to write. I wrote and re-wrote multiple beginnings, none of which worked. I couldn’t find where the spine was and I felt my mind going dead on me every time I tried to write.
The deadline was closing in on me and I was forced to just start writing what I knew – what my fingers knew as my mind was a fog – and the middle of a story formed that I didn’t even know was there.
Once I had the middle down, the ending and the beginning came easily. And it turned out all the boring parts that I thought had to be in even though I had no idea how to include them didn’t need to be in at all (another bonus point for writing what you know first).
Some articles are like sipping a cold mojito while lounging on a warm sunny beach. Some articles you have to sweat buckets, sloughing through a muddy maze in the darkness, hoping against desperate hope to find a gem at the end.