Writing Should Be Hard

Why Intellectual Struggle Is a Sign You're Doing It Right

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

What if I told you that feeling confused by your own argument is actually a good sign? That wrestling with ideas for weeks, months, or even years isn't evidence you're doing something wrong but proof you're doing something right?

I know that sounds backwards, but hear me out. So many academics I’ve met, from new PhD students to seasoned professors, think that if the writing is difficult, then the ideas are bad or we just aren’t cut out for this work.

Here's what I've learned from my own writing process and from coaching other academic writers: when intellectual work feels difficult, you’re doing exactly what scholars are supposed to do. Thinking at the edge of human knowledge production is inherently challenging.

The Problem with Easy

Somewhere along the way, many of us bought into this idea that brilliant people think effortlessly. Insights should arrive fully formed on the page and arguments should flow like water. If you're struggling to articulate a complex idea, you must not be scholarly material.

This, my dear reader, is nonsense, and it's harmful nonsense at that.

Einstein spent nearly a decade wrestling with gravity before showing that it was best understood as the curvature of spacetime itself. He later reflected on that journey this way:

The years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion and the final emergence into the light—only those who have experienced it can understand it.

Let’s think about his words: Anxious. Alterations of confidence. Exhaustion. Einstein didn’t have rapid, flowing thoughts developed in a few months—he wrestled with uncertainty for YEARS until clarity emerged.

So, my dear reader, if it’s taking you months or even years to refine your ideas, you are in good company. If you sat down to write and everything flowed freely, you'd probably be writing about ideas that are already widely accepted.

As Cathy Mazak recently put it:

You want writing to be hard because that means you are on to something. If it was easy, then everybody else would have already done it. It would be within the sphere of an already accepted way of thinking about things, but that’s not what you want. You want writing to be hard; you want the work to be hard; you want it to be intellectually difficult because as the work gets harder and harder, the more you grow intellectually.

But so many brilliant people I know believe they are the problem rather than realizing that it is the work itself that is inherently difficult. A client told me recently, "I've been working on this chapter for two months and I keep getting confused by my own argument. I think I'm just not smart enough for this project."

But when she described what was confusing her, I heard something completely different. She was wrestling with competing interpretations of her data, trying to account for contradictory findings in the literature, and attempting to develop a framework that didn't exist before in her field. Of course it was hard! She was doing original thinking.

The problem is that we don't discuss the actual difficulties enough, which makes many people feel like outsiders for experiencing oh-so-common struggles.

So I'm here to shout it from the rooftops of the ivory tower: when it's difficult to work through your ideas, it means you're pushing the limits of your knowledge! You're trying to say something new, taking intellectual risks, and doing the kind of work that actually advances human understanding. It is not an innate weakness in you; rather, it is the hallmark of scholarly work.

Two Kinds of Hard

This acknowledged, it’s also critical to distinguish between when something is intellectually difficult and when it is emotionally difficult. My client example above demonstrates at least two kinds of hard: “thinking hard” and “feelings hard.”

Thinking hard is what happens when you're doing the cognitive work of wrestling with complex ideas. You're trying to synthesize contradictory sources, develop an original argument, or say something that's never been said quite this way before. Your brain feels tired because it's doing heavy lifting, because you're pushing against the boundaries of what you know and understand.

Feelings hard is the emotional stuff—the doubt, the fear, the voice that says "this isn't good enough" or "everyone else is smarter than me." It's what makes you want to close your laptop and scroll Instagram instead of facing your draft. This kind of difficulty comes from our relationship with the work, not the work itself.

Both are normal, but they require different responses.

Working With the Hard

The goal isn't to eliminate difficulty; instead, it's to learn how to work with it productively. This is where reflective practice becomes invaluable. When you hit a wall in your writing, instead of immediately retreating or assuming you're failing, try this: Open a fresh document or pull out a pen and paper and spend 15-20 minutes writing about the difficulty itself.

For thinking hard, ask yourself:

• What exactly is confusing me about this argument?

• What competing ideas am I trying to hold together?

• What would happen if I followed this line of thinking all the way through?

• What am I afraid this argument might reveal?

For feelings hard, dig into:

• What story am I telling myself about this difficulty?

• When did I first start feeling stuck?

• What would I tell a friend experiencing this same challenge?

• What would change if I trusted that this difficulty is part of the process?

I use this reflective writing all the time in my own work and with my writing clients as well. I recently got stuck on an article, and I was unsure of the direction I wanted to take the argument. My first instinct was to avoid it and work on something easier instead. I am the queen of procrastinating hard things, like many of my dear readers.

Instead of quitting, I forced myself to sit down and write about the problem, spending maybe twenty minutes just flowing through both possible directions for the argument. By the end, I knew exactly which path excited me more.

That reflective moment taught me something bigger: clarity doesn’t come from waiting until you know the answer—it comes from being willing to write your way into it.

Which brings me to the question of how we live with uncertainty in our work.

Building Your Tolerance for Not Knowing

Toni Morrison said,

struggling through the work is extremely important—more important to me than publishing it.

She recognized that the difficulty itself was where the real work happened, where discovery lived. That's what I want for you too—not the elimination of difficulty, but the development of skills for working within it. Your reflective writing practice becomes a tool for building tolerance for intellectual discomfort. Each time you write through a difficult moment instead of around it, you're strengthening your capacity for the kind of thinking that actually matters. Each time you articulate your feelings about writing, you give yourself permission to think differently and create different scripts about yourself as a writer.

Permission to Stay With the Hard

The next time your writing feels difficult, when your argument seems tangled, when you can't quite say what you mean, or when you wonder if you're smart enough for the idea you're chasing, pause before you retreat. Ask yourself: Is this thinking hard or feelings hard?

• If it's thinking hard, congratulations! You're in the territory where new knowledge lives. Stay with it a little longer. Write about what's confusing you. Trust that wrestling with ideas is part of the work, not a sign you're doing it wrong.

• If it's feelings hard, be gentle with yourself, but don't give up. Use your reflective practice to explore what's underneath the difficulty. Often our feelings about our work reveal as much as the work itself.

Either way, remember you're in good company. Every scholar who's contributed something meaningful to human knowledge has sat exactly where you're sitting right now, wrestling with ideas for far longer than they would prefer. The difficulty you're experiencing isn't evidence that you're failing. It means you are exactly where you should be. Keep at it.

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