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| Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay |
People ask me about being a writer all the time.
They dream of sitting at home and writing and earring lots of money, but they’re not sure if they can do it, so they ask me if it’s hard to be a writer.
To be honest, I’m not sure exactly what they mean. Are they asking if it’s hard to sit alone and write, or if the actually writing is hard?
I think that there is no definitive answer to whether or not writing is hard or easy. It all depends on how you feel.
If you love to write, then writing is easy. But it’s still hard work in the number of hours you need to dedicate to doing it.
When I’m doing other things, I can talk to the people as I do it or I can listen to an audio or watch TV. If someone calls me and wants to chat (urgh!), I do something physical at the same time, like walking, cleaning, weeding, sewing, or cooking. In fact it’s amazing how much I can get done while my mind is occupied with something else.
But when it comes to writing, there is nothing else I can do at the same time. It takes up my time physically as well as mentally, which makes it such a solitary occupation.
But is writing hard?
I look at it this way, is going out for a run every day hard? Not if you enjoy it. If you’re a runner you look forward to it and love to be out running.
Me? I’m not a physically active person that way. I don’t like running at all. To me, having to go out and run every day would be torture. Yet I see others out pounding the pavement every morning and evening and loving it. They even stop and do some stretching too, while I watch them from my balcony, shake my head, and drink my coffee.
If you enjoy writing it won’t be hard. On the other hand, if thinking about writing makes you shrivel up and die a little inside, then writing every day really isn’t for you.
I find that even on days when I really don’t feel like writing and I’m wasting time procrastinating and pretending I’m busy doing other unimportant things, once I’m in my writing chair, my creative mind switches on and I can write for hours.
But while I’m writing, that’s all I’m doing. I can’t talk or listen to audios. And while it may look like I’m sitting calmly and passively, my mind is crazy-busy as the ideas race through it.
So if you enjoy writing, it won’t be hard. It never is for a truly creative person.
"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it's done. It's that easy, and that hard."
~ Neil Gaiman
Write More and Earn More
