Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk?

...and other unrelated things.

I've had a strange line of thinking in the past few days that I'd like to share with you, my unwitting audience.

I think that life is like writing a story. When you're writing, you tend to agonize over little details of grammar and flow. Sometimes you'll spend an entire day just trying think up a good name for a character or synonyms for "person." Other times, you craft a beautiful phrase that sounds lovely in your head, but can't find a single place to put it in the story itself. Inevitably, you put the phrase in whereever it sounds least bad, just so all that effort isn't wasted.

As you write, you try to imagine the reactions of an unknown reader. Will they find the main character sympathetic? Will they find the world believable? Will they somehow find some gaping hole in your plotline that you didn't realize was there? You try to explain things more fully so they will "get" it.

Inevitably, however, you finish and go back to read it over from the beginning. Suddenly, phrases that you found so compelling when you were writing them don't even catch your attention. Worse, sometimes they sound downright ridiculous. Events you enoyed writing about, you don't enjoy reading about. You find that the ending you had in mind when you started has evolved into something completely different.

You contemplate all your hours of work and despair at ever getting a story that you enjoy from start to finish, but in the end, you sit back down and start editing.