I am very lucky to belong to a great little writers group and enjoyed our regular bi-weekly meeting this lunchtime. As for many things nowadays, this was online, but I think we are all well used to this by now, and the meetings are always enjoyable.
They are a great motivation to me to keep writing, not because I feel embarrassed if I haven’t banged out thousands of words since the last meeting, but because I can see how much of a challenge it is for everyone. People go from dull-drum periods where they feel their writing is crap, through times where they can’t motivate themselves at all, to productive, enjoyable, sometime sustained, bursts of enthusiastic writing. And why is that motivating to me? Because I am just the same, and that means that it is OK to wonder whether it is worth it sometimes.
It must be wonderful to be a consistent writing, pushing out a steady few hundred or thousand words every day, of good quality. I also suspect that this is also extremely rare. So I will accept the periods where the writing gets away from me, where sentence structure is as natural as eating a wheelie bin; stop beating myself up about it, and enjoy the times where it flows. When it doesn’t, I shall just try to get a few words down, in the knowledge that when the better times come I will have raw material to work with. Easier to edit something than nothing.
Ultimately, I know I am never going to make a living from writing, it is just an enjoyable pastime for me. If people enjoy my writing, great, but if I don’t enjoy it, what is the point?
One thought on “Motivation for writing”