The Reality of Writing Is Unsexy, Chaotic and Messy

Robin Wilding's mind is an "iceberg of crazy".

Images by Freepik (edited by Robin Wilding and Kristina God)

Writers are a rather chaotic breed.

The reality of writing is unsexy, chaotic and messy - especially with kids in the house.

“It's a surprisingly messy and unwashed affair,” is how

Robin Wilding

, Medium writer, Boost nominator and editor of New Writer Welcome, describes it.

If you say:

“Exactamundo, Kristina and Robin!

You’ll be delighted with the way Robin outlines her situation 😂:

My hair lives in a messy bun that looks akin, much to my chagrin, to a bird's nest. I joke regularly that my yoga shorts are covered in enough Cheeto dust to cover an orangutan. And whether I’m on a writing roll or slump, I probably haven’t showered in two days.

No worries, it could also happen that Robin wears a pretty mermaid dress while writing.

Photo credit: Robin Wilding (*waggling my eyebrows* 👀👀)

I mean. Why not? It’s fun. It’s magical.

Robin thought:

“Life’s too short, buy the damned dress.”

And then wear it whenever you can 🤣

Off paper, my life is a mess and I have no idea where my kids are

Talking about the chaotic breed of writers. Have you met my friend

Michael Thompson

? He's new to Substack, but a well-known top Medium writer with more than 80,000 followers on Medium.

He’s a debut author of the book Shy by Design (our interview will (hopefully) be up tomorrow).

Michael shared this:

Photo credit: Michael Thompson (not sure whether his wife knows he’s sharing THIS on Notes; I think it looks fine compared to my kitchen ^^)

“My first book — Shy by Design — launched last week.

On paper, it’s going way better than expected and debuted in the Top 10 on Amazon in various new release categories like leadership, motivation, and inspiration.

Off paper, my life is a mess and I have no idea where my kids are.”

It feels representative of many of us.

Especially for writers who work part-time and wrestle with children.

Writing from the beach isn’t dreamy

If you've been following me for a while, you might know that I live a pretty dreamy life on an island with a beautiful white beach.

So naturally, I tried to write from the beach with my laptop open while the baby slept.

The waves were crashing high, the seagulls were screaming and my husband, who had just bought me this beautiful white laptop, was screaming along.

As you may know, sand gets everywhere.

So it got into the laptop and my husband spent 30 minutes shaking the laptop, swearing and begging me never to do that again.

There was another story about trying to write in a beach chair and another with the laptop on my belly while pregnant. But those are stories for another day.

Robin’s mind is an iceberg of crazy

“My mind is an iceberg of crazy. You see the funny, polished tip — but underneath a giant mass of jagged bits that could sink the Titanic.”

Here’s more about Robin’s writing process:

The Writing ‘Process’

If you unscrewed the top of my head and looked in, you’d probably back away slowly after seeing the cerebral tardigrades floating around in there attempting to turn dick jokes into prose. It truly is a chaotic yet wonderful place — and it works. Eventually anyway.

It’s rarely a linear line to a polished piece.

Frankensteining Puzzle Pieces

My brain bucket verbal diarrheas random thoughts onto a page in a scattered point form. I then Frankenstein the bits together in a writer-brained puzzle. Cutting and pasting them around into a semblance of coherence.

There are writers who write fully stream-of-consciousness though. Those people can go step on a Lego. I hope their margaritas always melt quickly and their straw never pierces their Caprisuns. Who’s jealous? Not me, clearly. I just hope their every USB insertion takes three attempts and all their microwaved fish sticks are frozen in the middle.

For the rest of us, it’s a battle with the page and carpal tunnel-inducing copy-pasting.

The Dead Draft

My draft folder is a burial ground of the bodies of shit-to-mediocre-to-great ideas. I stack more bodies in there than a mortuary after Vlad the Impaler passes through town. But, like any good scatterbrain, I return to the word corpses regularly to do CPR.

Sometimes it works — and turns into a piece on zombies.

In my experience, sometimes brilliant ideas don’t pan out, and dumb ones thought up with a single fried brain cell turn into magic. Some ideas simply need time to percolate through the caffeinated sieves that are our brains. When someone asks me how long it takes to write a piece, my frustratingly unhelpful answer is anywhere between one hour and…months.

You can’t rush the writer’s brain, although deadlines do help. I love the wooshing noise they make as they fly by.

Lists of Lists

No good organized bedlam writer is complete without lists. Lists of what? Lists of random thoughts, lists of jokes, lists of headlines. Lists of lists of listicles. Listless lists of listenables.

And for me, lists of quirky alliterations and synonyms about uterus unicorns and panty hamsters. Why lists of tawdry body-part synonyms? Because I’m a writer, I wanted to write one article about it then I hyperfocused on it until it had lost all meaning.

No, I haven’t been checked for ADHD, why do you ask?

Can I make a list to check off for it?

But back to lists. We need to write down ideas in a directory so we don’t forget them, like the Dory-brained cloudhoppers we are. We need catalogs to remind us of those ideas. We need checklists to actually get anything done. Then we need point-form lists to brain dump onto a page.

Writers' brains function on the controlled chaos of lists.

⭐⭐Hungry for more from Robin Wilding?

Join today’s live session with Robin Wilding at 1pm EST by upgrading and becoming a member.

You’ll get immediate access to the Zoom link.

Let’s have some fun together!

(Replay will be available)

See ya in a bit!⭐⭐

P.S. Would be lovely if you could share this awesome news with other wordaholics and chaotic writers💖Thanks!

P.P.S. Here’s my interview with Robin from a few months back about Medium’s Boost to 10x your earnings.