It’s been said that if you do what you love you’ll never work another day in your life.
I wonder, as a fellow writer – a scribbler in arms, as it were, do you agree?
Writing is hard work.
Any writer who hasn’t wished for an easier calling, shouted at as his or her monitor, or taken an extended break and thought about never taking up the pen again, either hasn’t been writing for very long or is a bold faced liar! I said it. Now, let’s talk about it.
Writing is work. I don’t care how much you love it. You’ll never have a day free from work if you remain a writer, because even if you take a day off, go on vacation, or throw your laptop away in frustration, you’ll still be thinking about your next words, your next sentence, and how to resolve those irresolvable plot holes (no don’t kill off all your characters in a mass extinction event).
If I’m being honest with you, there seem to be more reasons to hate writing than to love it.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my calling, but on those late nights when I’ve been sitting staring at the blank screen for hours without the slightest clue what I should write next, I can find myself hating it. I dread those nights, especially when they turn into days… weeks, and well… it can get ridiculous. You’ve been there.
And it’s not just when I can’t write. There are times when I write nonstop for hours, even days, pouring over a single blog post, and then when I finally feel it’s finished and good work, I post it, and nobody seems to care. Only a few views and a couple likes is depressing. Figuring out what went wrong is a nightmare all of its own. Posts that go south add a ton of pressure for the follow up to be epic, and the work, yes THE work, gets harder still.
Sometimes I go back and reread some of my more popular articles and still wonder what I was thinking. What I used to think was fantastic I am suddenly repulsed by. It’s weird as hell. I often hover over the delete button, ready and willing to remove my writing from the universe. Someone needs to save the readers eyes from this horrible mess. But then I look at the shares and see that thousands of people liked it and I can’t help but wonder why. I back away from the delete button hesitantly and unsure if I should allow the post to live on.
We are our own worst enemies critics.
The saying should read something like:
If you do what you love you’ll work harder than you’ve ever worked before and sometimes you’re going to hate it, but in the end your love for it will win out (well, most of the time).
I think that’s more accurate. Agree?
The hard work is worth it.
We love our craft not because it’s easy but because it is our calling.
Yes, the nights can be long and lonely at times. Yes, the words often don’t show up when we want them to. And yes, we are a lot harder on ourselves than we deserve.
But here’s the thing, bleeding words on the page is what we do, and all the pain, the agony, and the fears and the doubts are what makes our words great when they’re great. And rest assured, they’re not always great, but when they are, it doesn’t fucking matter how hard the work was – it was worth it and you’ll do it again and again, and again.
Writing is our drug and we can never get enough. We love it one day and hate it the next, but we’re going to keep doing it. That’s what writers do.
