After doing NaNoWriMo…

…for the second time in 11 years. I discovered that there’s NaBloPoMo.

Here’s the funny thing. Until the last few years, I used to blog everyday. I used to write anything that came to mind in a post. Usually a theme, a scene, a moment. That was so easy for me (obviously evidenced by the more than 10 years in the right column). I am shameless in blogging. In this blog. It’s easy to write short form and I have practiced it for so many years.

I almost laughed out loud. But then I realized that I had always done it, so it comes so naturally to me. All I had to do was build time for it, which by now, had become part of my daily routine.

But to write longform? To write an entire story where I had to set the scene, build the tension, build characters, carry the story with short moments, then long moments, then the arc, and the character transformation? That, my readers, is hard.

In doing all of this, it seems easy because you haven’t experienced it. The consumption part is the easy part. The actual creation part, people think, is easy, because it was so easy to consume. It’s like how people think a company name is easy. It’s how people think designing an mobile app or logo is so easy (look! you can just do it with just a single pen stroke!). It’s how people think that deciding the right color and font face is easy. It may be, but then that person is just very lucky.

It’s not easy until you have experienced it. Then it becomes easy because you have done so often. That you have built a thick skin and have established your body to expect these moments…that it seems easy.

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