And as the turn of the year came, all non-professional writers opened their laptops to begin their new years resolutions. Unfortunately, they didn’t get around to actually writing anything due to a hectic morning playing Solitaire and writing To-Do-Lists.
It is a strange situation to have a day-job whilst trying to forge a career in writing. A lot of people perceive the notion of being a writer but rarely actually commit to paper the evidence.
Against all of my better judgement and desire, I have become one of those people. I spent six months of my life so obsessed with my first novel “Dazed, Beautiful and Bruised” in 2006 and the subsequent 18 months of rewrites that I have completely forgotten what it is to write 1,000 words a day. It seems that I can make as many resolutions as I want, the process of actually getting started seems so alien that it just won’t happen.
To read interviews with famous and successful writers, you typically are fed the stories of how that writer simply has to write. They wake up in the morning with a burning desire that can only be quenched by writing pages of prose; they simply have no choice.
In my experience, these stories are all fabrications. You wake up in the morning with a pressure to write; an unnerving feeling in the pit of your stomach. You spend the first hour of the day trying to come up with as many different activities as possible to avoid actually starting. Then, finally, you sit down and do your work for the day. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad.
The difference between writing and other jobs is that when it’s good – when you really write something that you’re happy with or come up with an idea that fits beautifully and ties your plot together, there is no better feeling. It is the equivalent of scoring a goal in football or of getting four numbers in the lottery. The euphoria is amazing.
Unfortunately, this happens sporadically. To me, it happens less than it probably should and that is probably why I still have a day-job.
It is not these moments of magic that define a writer though. To be able to write a beautiful passage of words is something that a lot of people are capable of – like singing, for example. You only have to go down to a karaoke night in a pub to hear that ordinary members of the public can possess wonderful singing voices and it is the same in writing. What distinguishes a writer from a would-be writer is dedication and persistence.
As I awoke at the crack of dawn to eagerly write for two hours before the day job in 2006, I felt like a writer. Not everything was good and not everything was bad but the most important thing was that it was consistently coming out of me. Since completing that novel and spending two years studying its inconsistencies, failures and frustrations, I’ve lost that persistence.
It’s hard to let go of one project and to start another. I’m not allowed to tinker with the novel anymore; it is officially finished, for better or worse. If I let myself, I could probably spend the next 10 years messing with it until it resembled little of the spirit that it was written in. Moving on to the next piece of work has been difficult; not least due to the self-doubt that creeps in when literary agents reject your submissions and picking yourself up in moments like this are difficult.
Unfortunately, my way of picking myself up results in me continuing to plan my next work in excruciating detail. This gets to the point where my head is so frazzled by To Do Lists and New Years writing targets that I can’t actually write anything anyway.
It is in these moments that I do still feel a little like a writer. The fact that I can write 700 words about my love/hate relationship as a means of not beginning work this morning somehow confirms that to me. I should really get back to it – well, maybe after one more game of Solitaire…
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