When I love being a writer

I had one of those days on Friday. The kind that makes you glad you're a writer. I woke early and immediately opened my laptop to make words. I'd written a chapter the day before that I knew was in the wrong order. The hero had to tell the heroine something before it would make sense for her to do something else. (That's all the more detail I can give you...the book's just too funny to spoil.) And somehow or another I'd written them in the wrong order.

Anyway, I decided that before I'd make new words I'd fix the old ones. I switched the scenes and then had to fix the references since the order had changed. But as I was fixing and repairing, I found a word or two that could be better. I pumped up descriptions. I made dialogue funnier. And ended up adding four pages.

When I was done with that chapter it sang. But, even better, I felt like a writer again.

We spend so much time working to hit word counts, speed drafting, worrying about hitting plot points and just plain left-braining through our books that we sometimes forget writing is an art and that our right brain would like to come out and play too.

We also forget that most of us became writers because we like the art of it. We enjoy playing with words. We enjoy a fun turn of phrase. We like build ups and surprises. Twists. Turns. Great descriptions.

Don't deny yourself the pure pleasure of writing well. You may not be able to do it every day. You may have to do those 1000-word sprints three times a day or have to hit a weekly word count to make a deadline. I get that. But one day a week or maybe one hour a day...wouldn't you like to go back and take a look at your words? Play with dialogue. Create descriptions that sing?

Of course you would.

If you're denying yourself that pleasure...that could be part of the reason you sometimes feel burned out or disconnected from your work. You need that pleasure to feed your soul.

So give yourself that day or that hour and make your writer's soul happy again.

Happy Monday

susan