So I took a two-week vacation from writing. I didn’t really do it on purpose, though I should have. I should know by now that when I push myself too hard to establish a routine, I start feeling like I have to write whether I like it or not, and that’s just death to desire. I’m sure it’s some innate mixture of stubbornness and laziness, but I’ve found through experience that when I push myself too hard — not creatively, but just trying to maintain a steady, hammering pace — I quit. Just quit like a car run out of gas. Slowly, I’m beginning to realize that this is me protecting me from myself.
I want to keep loving writing. That’s more important to me than being published. I want to keep writing no matter what, because my brain gets itchy when I’m not writing. If I go too long without writing, I’m miserable. But I needed a couple of weeks to let the brain fog clear and to relax into writing again without the pressure of a word count goal hanging over my head. So for the past two weeks, even though I didn’t make myself write, I found my mind drifting again and again to my stories and what I’d do with them when I picked them up again. Because there was never a question that I would go back to writing.
Both John Scalzi and Justine Larbalestier blogged recently about what it means to be a writer. John was asked if he would ever quit writing and he basically said no, because it’s a part of who he is. Justine talked about the difference between writer as identity and writer as a career. Careers come and go, but writers write, and that’s really all there is to it. What I need to do is stop trying to write by rules that work for other people but not for me.
So I’m giving up on the daily goal of 500 or 1000 words. It’s the kind of thing that works well for a lot of people, but I don’t seem to be one of them. This doesn’t mean I won’t be writing, even writing every day. It just means that I’m not going to stress myself out about an arbitrary goal when all I should be thinking about are the stories themselves.
