When you're writing at age thirteen or seventeen or even twenty-one, everything you write is glowing and pure. Everything that comes off your pen or keyboard seems brilliant, both to you and to your teacher.
It seems that way to your teachers because even moderately average writing ability is so far ahead of the average slob in high school. It doesn't take much to sound brilliant when your classmates can't write a complete sentence. Your writing glows in your own eyes because it's fun and easy, and you can write acres of pages about whatever you want while neatly skirting the big giant white elephant, the behemoth that will wake you in the middle of the night at age thirty-five or forty and make you itch and squirm with its need-to-be-toldness. At twenty-one, even if you're well-read by that time, you don't have a lifetime of extensive reading under your belt, in your head, sitting on your shoulders telling you, "You're boring! Nobody's going to read that! Wooden! Fake! Full of cliches! Bah!"
When I hear a young person tell me that writing is easy for them, I think, "Ah, they've not learned to edit yet." Ruthlessly butchering your baby, over and over again, is the only way you get better at writing, whether it's poetry or prose. But being able to do that means you know too much about the craft of writing, and the editor part of your brain starts constantly hectoring while you put words on the page. It becomes hard to simply get the mileage of track laid down so that you've got the huge bulk of material you need for later re-writing.
Writing is brutal.
