It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted. I've enjoyed having a blog again, and I've really been scratching my head for topics. The one I keep coming back to feels like a variation on my post "Don't Write Every Day," and I'm always wary of beating a dead horse.
Thing is, it seems like that message needs repeating. Often.
So many people fall into the trap of believing that people who don't write every day just aren't working hard enough. The thing is, you don't know how hard I work. You don't know just how hard it is to put my butt in the chair, as the common advice goes, and put words on the page.
"Hard work" is subjective, as well. There are days I can put down several thousand words without breaking a sweat. More commonly, I struggle to string together even a few paragraphs. Hitting 500 feels like a miracle. That doesn't somehow mean I worked "harder" or "better" on the day I wrote a few thousand.
I have to celebrate the baby steps. Every word is a victory. I've spent a long time feeling like I'm not successful because I don't have any published books to my name. I've spent a long time feeling miserable because it feels like I can never do enough, and my words will only mean anything once people can buy them in a bookstore.
I have never been a fan of the way the writing community puts published writers up on a pedestal, as if they are harder-working, better-writing, better-than-the-rest-of-us paragons of authordom. I have never liked the way that we as writers only seem to "count" once we sign that contract and have an official book deal--or, sometimes, when we only count once our book is on the shelf at Books a Million.
Writers are writers are writers, and we as a community have got to give more respect to those who struggle, who work for a week and produce only a handful of words, or who go weeks or months or years without being able to write much at all. We have got to have more respect for those who break themselves trying to meet far-off goals, only to realize that cramming themselves into the mold of what the community says success looks like is making them miserable.
There are countless paths to success as a writer. There are countless views on what "success" even means. There are countless ways to work hard, there are countless ways to produce content, and there are countless ways to be an author.
Your success is not the only way of being successful. Your accomplishments are not the only ones that took hard work. Your hard work is not the measuring stick by which others should be judged.
It's hard being too exhausted to write. It's hard being constantly told what my goals should be, what my workload should be, and what my daily output should be. It makes me hate writing, sometimes, to know that I'm "not working hard enough" by a lot of folks' standards.
Screw your standards, I work by my own. I am a writer regardless of what my output looks like, and I refuse to listen to those who put arbitrary quotas on people they don't even know.
It feels terrible to know that there are folks out there who think you're not doing enough. It feels terrible to find yourself buying into it, and to catch yourself beating yourself up for going a day without putting down words.
Don't let the gatekeepers and the naysayers get you down, because they're full of crap.
Every word is a victory. Celebrate it as such.
You are a real writer, and you belong in the writing community.
I promise.
Until next time,
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