Teresa Wells

Writing a book sounds so lofty.  When you tell friends and acquaintances about your project, they oooh and aahh.  But they don't know about all the peaks and valleys that go along with serious writing.  People really don't want to hear more than the basics of what the story's about, anyway -- maybe a sentence or two, at that.  They don't want to hear about how you get up at four in the morning to write for an hour so that you can get to your real job at seven; how you are often at an impasse in your story, thinking, is anybody going to want to read this, or is this terribly boring?  Or how you labor over choosing just the right word, consulting your laptop's thesaurus, and when that one seems inferior, you run to the bookshelf and thumb through the really thick thesaurus on the hunt for that elusive perfect word -- only to return to your original word. Or worse, an extremely common, one syllable word instead. Writing is constant analysis.