I like to write... usually

Hey guys!

This month, I wanted to do something a little bit different. Lately we’ve been talking a lot about craft and ways to hone your writing, but I thought it’d be good to talk about the human side of things. We’re all people, after all. We all have our struggles with writing, editing, even reading. And so that’s what I’m talking about in the month of March. The struggles of being a writer, and how I personally work through them.

First up?

Sometimes, I don’t like to write.

I know, that’s quite the admission, isn’t it? But it’s true. There are some times when I sit down to write, and I just don’t like what I’m doing. It’s not that I don’t like what I’m writing, that I don’t like the story or the characters, or even that things aren’t flowing the way I want them to—it’s legitimately that I don’t like the act of writing.

And I’m convinced that it happens to all of us, at one point or another. After all, this is the thing we spend most of our time doing, and after a while, it’s bound to get old.

That’s okay.

That’s what I have to continually tell myself, when I’m struggling to get words on a page because I’m tired of getting words on a page. It’s okay to want to take a break from what I’m doing. It’s okay to not want to write today. It’s okay to take a day and not write at all. Actually, it’s okay to go on hiatus for a bit, if that’s what you need to do.

You don’t want to burn out. I don’t want to burn out. Writing is something that we, as writers, love doing. We straight up love writing. But if it’s getting to the point that it’s getting old, rote, wearisome, then it’s okay to take some time away from it.

Taking time away from it will help you not to fall out of love with what you’re doing. It’ll keep the act of writing fresh and new, as beautiful and mysterious as the day you started writing.

For me, that’s the goal.

I want writing to be as fun fifty years from now as it was when I started to pen my very first novel. I want to always be enjoying what I’m doing.

But there are days when I don’t, and on those days, I just remind myself that that’s normal, and I work on something else for a while.

There’s always editing to do, isn’t there?

[love}

{Rani D.}