Time to dust off the blog and announce that I’m miserably blocked. I haven’t written or edited any of my original fiction since late last year, when I had my short story, “It Should’ve Been You,” published in io9. I wrote that story over the course of roughly two weeks specifically for the website’s “Future of Death” fiction call coinciding with the week of Halloween. The pay rate was excellent and I lurk on Gizmodo’s blogs pretty much every weekday, so it was an easy decision to enter…except I didn’t expect to be chosen at all, let alone that I would be the only one chosen out of God only knows how many entries. The check I received is the most I’ve ever earned for my fiction, ever. I didn’t have the guts to read the comments section and I still don’t, but I received a lot of great feedback via social media.
You’d think that would’ve been the motivation I needed to write and submit even more, but health issues have been my priority since the beginning of the year.
Until relatively recently I couldn’t sleep, I was in constant pain, and I was operating on fumes. Creative writing for pleasure or for career development barely even crossed my mind. Quite a difference from 2017-18, but it honestly didn’t really faze me like I might have expected it would. Sure, I occasionally worried that the people who followed me on Twitter or Facebook because of my short stories would get bored once they realized I was only going to post sporadically about cats or fibromyalgia, but that was more like background noise. Eventually I came to a realization:
I don’t need to write consistently; I just need to write when I want to.
Obviously this puts a bit of a hitch into my longtime “dream” of becoming a full-time novelist, but over time my perspective has changed. Writing is often rewarding, but it’s also work, and the balance between work and pleasure becomes significantly skewed once you’re relying on your ability to write in order to pay your bills. Could I write more fiction if a (external) deadline was looming over my head? Yeah, I’ve done that countless times before. Is it enjoyable when I do that? No, it’s usually pretty trash. Recently Ava DuVernay crystallized my feelings perfectly on Twitter:
@mang0ld @rianjohnson @ava @JordanPeele @edgarwright @nlyonne”
CRSvanX Original Tweet: “question for you writers, doing it for a living or a hobby, how do you stay on top of your writing? how do you break spells of inactivity and drag yourself back to the page or computer screen, how do you keep your enthusiasm for a piece?”
@ava: “I don’t start to hunker down and really get serious until I HAVE to. Not one of those folks who writes daily for the love of the written word. Nope. The deadline has to be looming large for me to get serious. Very bad habit. But I’ve accepted that I work best under pressure.”
The traditional advice has always been that writing every day is the only way to make it to the big leagues. But recently authors have started to push back on that, stressing that everyone works differently and forcing yourself to fit a mold that runs contrary to your natural habits will only leave you frustrated and burnt out. Of course that’s a positive development, but the fact remains that professional writers are beholden to endless deadlines of some kind. You may not want to write every day, but you have to write consistently, whatever that means to you, in order to sustain a career at least until you reach George R. R. Martin levels of success. Both he and Ava DuVernay are extremely successful and talented people who still struggle with motivation. If consistency is often hard for them, why should it be any different for me?
That said, I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe becoming a full-time fiction writer is not realistic or ideal for me anymore. To be clear, I’ll always be a writer. But in order to sustain my mental and physical health, I might have to keep writing cordoned away as a side hustle and hobby for now. And that’s OK. There are a million and one paths to a career as a writer, and none of them are wrong. As Daniel José Older so brilliantly put it, “Writing begins with forgiveness.”
So even as I reluctantly begin edits on a novella that I plan to have out on submission in a few months, I’m not worried about taking a little too long and missing the deadline. Opportunities will always be available for me when I’m ready for them. The same goes for you, too.
