Rambling - Writing Difficult Purple Successes

Art by mstrueblue (check DeviantArt)
(No, I don't know the artist)

I find myself in a strange and interesting situation, one that I never could have imagined in a previous age of my life.  It seems that my writing is now better than at any time before, yet it is more difficult to produce than at any other time.  This is progress and failure; it is joyous and frustrating; it is a nightmare of wondrous proportion.

In the past, I seem to remember that writing came to me as easily as playing a game.  I could, and often did, write for hours on end without any real difficulty that I can remember.  The sheer amount of fiction I have developed in my life is, I believe, staggering.  I have kept almost none of it, since that wasn't the point.  I simply enjoyed the process itself, and while I would have been happy to let people read my work that was never my goal and I never felt any loss when I deleted, lost, or otherwise did away with things that I had written.

Of those two aspects, ease and joy, the latter has not abated in the slightest.  I still feel a great love for my work (even as much as I complain that I hate it; the process is still a great pleasure for me), yet the production if any writing has become a difficult exercise.  To produce anything on a page has become now, instead of the easy flow of thoughts to words that I once experienced, an oft-frustrating battle to make anything happen well enough to even function on a page.  Yet, for all the difficulty, I fully believe that anything I write now is far beyond everything I ever produced when it was easy.

So I cannot help but wonder about the chicken and the egg.  Is my writing better now because I am trying harder and, from my perspective, making it more difficult on myself?  Was my writing in the past easier because it was of a lower caliber and therefore easier to spew?  To be honest, is my writing even genuinely better than it once was?  The dragon's hoard of my work has never been read by anyone other than me and, given that it no longer exists, it honestly never will be.  Yet now that I produce less work that I believe is a bit better, I wonder if perhaps I am simply so in love with the writing itself that I am overfond of what I end up producing.

Ever met a parent who loved an ugly child beyond measure?  Fuck I hate that.

Not to say I am complaining, or that I believe my work is dirt (which, of course, I occasionally do).  This is simply an observation that has given me cause to pause and ponder.  It used to be easy and low in quality, now writing is difficult but ends up better.  So I cannot help but wonder...which part determines which?

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