A piece of writing advice to myself:
Writing will not always be fun. Sometimes it will be work. It will be hard. You’ll look at every word you put down and loathe it. You will wonder why you try. It will be tough and a grind,
That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.
You know, I’m gonna add to this, cus I think it’s worth adding.
I’ve seen some posts about how writing should be fun, and when it’s not you should step back and reevaluate and I agree, to an extent. If the project your working on is thankless, or your a hobbiest who is here to have a good time, or you’ve felt like this is a slog for weeks, then yes, absolutely, step back and reevaluate. Your entire writing project should not be like pulling teeth. You should have fun with it and when that fun is gone, be kind to yourself and take a breather.
At the same time, however, I think it’s important to remember that no matter how much you love a project, or how much your care about it, if it’s long, there’s going to be a point at writing it where it’s no longer fun but work. It might be during a tough scene where figuring everything out requires mental gymnastics. It might be because it’s a bridge between two sections and you just wanna get on with it. It might be because of something else entirely. Long story short, there’s gonna be a point where there’s a scene that will just not be fun to write. It will be hard work.
But it will be worthwhile work. Because as soon as you get that rough down, you feel accomplished and you can move onto the fun bits. You can have fun dressing it up later, when you know how it’s functioning in the piece as a whole. Doing it is gonna suck, but afterwards is gonna rock.
There’s never been a long piece I’ve done where I haven’t slogged through a section. And there hasn’t been a long piece that after slogging through that section, it becomes a section I adore, because it reminds me how fucking hard I worked on it, and how well I made it work in edits. Sometimes, it becomes my favorite section.
In short, writing doesn’t have to be fun to be worthwhile. It can be work. That doesn’t mean you’ll never enjoy it.
I’m so grateful to you for talking about this, because this is something I struggle like hell with. I’ve never finished a long work, because I always hit a spot where it gets so hard and un-fun and I just. I guess maybe I don’t know how to tell the difference between having to fight for it vs. it just failing.
So hearing other writers talk about that helps A LOT for understanding what’s going on there and what I might be able to do about it.
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