Sunday, December 24, 2017

For those of you considering a New Year's resolution to write more...

...I decided a few weeks ago to put writing for on hold for a while. Since that decision, I haven't been able to stop writing. Seriously. I had been stuck for over a month, unable to write anything and chiding myself for not writing. The moment I decided to give up, words came.

I've said before I'm not a big believer in writing every day. I think if you write every day, if you treat writing like it's your job, you end up with writing that sounds like it's your job. That is, it risks coming off as perfunctory. Write when you can't stop from writing, not when you feel obligated.

In my four-year run of seriously trying to write, the two most fertile writing periods I've had were immediately after making a decision to quit.

There must be something to the psychology of this. Straining to write, you feel the whole time like you're failing, like you're under pressure to do this thing you've set out to do. But if you already accept that you're done, if you tell yourself you shouldn't even be writing, that you have better things to do, writing feels like a stolen pleasure.

When I found out I was getting a book published early in 2017, I felt a lot of pressure to start acting like a writer. That sort of made writing a lot less enjoyable. It took six months of failure at the end of 2017 to get me to realize again that this is not my day job, it's something I do for the joy it brings me. When it doesn't bring me joy, I shouldn't do it.

I hope you write a lot in 2018. Unless you hate it, in which case I hope you don't write at all. But then I hope not writing makes you learn to love writing again at some point.

Merry Christmas, readers and writers.

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