Writing is Work
I’m not a good writer. If I was a good writer, words would be able to flow through me without effort and without hours of editing to make them work for my purposes. I’d be able to sit pretty and pensively in my office as I contemplated the meaning of language and how to best craft language in the perfect structure to tell the best story possible. Words would be my past, present, and future as I dedicate my entire being to writing them in the best respect possible and never once waver in my devotion.
In reality, my writing sessions are spent mostly flipping through social media as I procrastinate on my manuscripts. When I’m not flipping through social media, I’m usually snacking or hunting for my next snack. I’ll write a sentence or two then spend fifteen minutes cleaning out my Spotify playlists even though I just scrubbed them a day ago. If I do end up writing anything of substance, it usually takes months or sometimes years of editing to make it work. Lately I’ve been in the habit of taking month long hiatuses from writing in favor of spending my free time enjoying video games or my friends instead of the written word. Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen would roll in their graves if they knew my lack of allegiance to the honesty of true literature where I write from my heart and let that skill speak for itself.
The truth is that to be a successful writer, writing is work. Even the most naturally gifted of us have to work to be successful. It’s forcing yourself to write when it’s the last thing you want to do. It’s dedicating an hour a day to writing and committing to that hour to the best of your abilities. Even when you’d rather spend that hour scrolling on Instagram, you still put some effort into your manuscript/journal/poetry etc. That’s why NanoWriMo has been so successful for so many writers. The month-long challenge to complete 50,000 words of a manuscript with accountability from others in the writing community forces authors to work and actually write. It’s like any other goal folks would hope to achieve, such as trying to read more. You have to actually dedicate time and energy to it even when you don’t necessarily want to dedicate the time and energy.
Writing is also work by requiring an author to make an effort to revitalize a writing process when a slump occurs. I’ve honestly been in a writing slump for several months at this point and it’s been a struggle to get back into the heart of it. I’ve been working on writing smaller pieces, entering short story contests, and writing comics with Rocket Grande to get my writing juices flowing again for my novel-writing. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve also been blogging more to get back into the rhythm of writing regularly and practice expressing vulnerability. While it’s been a fun venture, it’s still work. It would be easier to just give it up and turn into a potato playing Stardew Valley without abandon but I want to write, so I have to give it some work to be able to write.
While we all would love to only write when inspiration hits, when the words can flow as easily from us as blood from our veins, the reality is that nothing would get written that way. It’s a fine way to write if you intend to keep writing as a hobby, but if you’re hoping to make it a career then you have to treat it as one and that means writing when you don’t really want to write. That means manufacturing inspiration, allowing yourself to sit in the discomfort of not knowing what comes next in the story so that you can eventually make it through and keep on writing. In fact, boredom allows you to be more creative so really if you spend your dedicated hour of writing just sitting there trying to concoct a way through a block, that’s still a productive use of your writing time according to science. Thanks science!
To improve as a writer, that requires work too. It requires reading books you don’t really want to read to study other writers’ writing styles or plot developments. It requires hours of writing miles of wasted words that will never be read by anyone else so you can fully comprehend and understand the complexity of a specific concept or phrase. It requires actually taking a hard look at your work and analyzing it in full to see where it can be improved and swallowing your pride so that you can accept that criticism with an open mind. On a more emotional level, it requires putting your work out there and accepting how the world receives it regardless if it’s good or bad. That level of rejection and vulnerability also requires work to cultivate and encourage. Not to mention, the actual process of publishing your words can also require a level of work for your writing.
However, as writing is work, it’s important to treat yourself with the same respect you’d treat yourself with your normal career. Take days off when you need it. Coast through a shift of your dedicated writing time by spending the entire time designing your characters on a dress-up website. Even if you have a full eight hour day available for writing, don’t force yourself to spend the entire eight hours on the one task of writing. Diversify your work day. Take a lunch (or a nap) and treat yourself with kindness. If you don’t, then you run the risk of burning yourself out from writing and taking a hiatus when you don’t intend to because the thought of writing will make you barf.
I’m not a good writer. I’ll never reach the levels of Austen and Hemingway where every word I ever etch onto a page will be regarded as automatic literary gold. But I am a good worker. I’m good at forcing myself to sit down and edit the same chapter I’ve been editing for the past three years trying to make it work with the rest of the story. I’m very, very good at reading whatever I can get my hands on so I can expose myself to as many writing styles and different plot developments as possible. Acknowledging that I’m a good worker is beneficial for preventing my writing burnout and also allows me to find better balance between living my life, enjoying the non-writing aspects, and actually writing.
Maybe I’ll never be a good writer. But I’m satisfied with being a good worker and putting that work towards my passion of writing to fill my life, so shouldn’t that be enough?