Work/Fun

Recently I’ve spent a lot of time talking to new writers who don’t understand how I can find the time to write 4,000-5,000 words a day while keeping everything else going at the same time.

Oddly enough, it coincided with today’s post.

#10.      You have to find your own way to make writing fun, to make it worthwhile, or it will eat you

The thing with writing is that it’s tedious. It sometimes gets old fast. And it takes up a lot of your time. So if you already have a job, yeah, it’s going to be difficult to find the time to do it—and a lot of the time, you’re probably not going to want to.

That’s where point #10 comes in.

If you don’t keep it fun (for you, the writer), then you may as well give up. Your writing not only needs to be something that you enjoy, but it needs to be something that you think could really turn into something one day.

(Yes, I know, we all have to write boring scenes from time to time that we’d rather not include but need to be there to move the story forward—those are beside the point)

Without the fun aspect, writing is no different from any other job. It becomes mundane and commonplace, something that you could easily give up on in your life.

If this is how you feel about writing, you have two options:

• Give up completely
• Spice it up and get yourself back in the game

Now I’ve only had one other real job in my lifetime, and I hated it. I don’t use that term loosely, so you’ll know how much I didn’t like working there.

After that, I knew that all I wanted to do was write. But even then, some days it gets old and tedious and I don’t want to do it.

It’s on days like that, days where all I want to do is sit and watch TV, that I remind myself of this:

Without having fun, without finding something in my work that thoroughly interests me, I might as well be back at my old job, doing something I hated.

And that’s never been what writing is to me, nor should it be to you, if it's what you really want to do. 

Writing is work. It's a business. But nobody ever said that business can't be fun. 

{RD}