When I was a teenager I became a writer. My 7th grade English teacher got me started by assigning our class to write a short story. I had just finished reading a book over Christmas vacation that fired my imagination, and the assignment couldn’t have come at a better time. A few days later she took me aside after class and told me she liked my story and wanted to enter it in a city-wide competition. I was flattered, and eagerly agreed.
The short story, more of a thinly-veiled summary than an original work, got me an invitation to a one-day writing workshop for junior and senior high schoolers where we got to listen to presentations from real writers, culminating in an award ceremony. I was blown away when I won second place city-wide for my grade. I was also hooked.
My writing was intermittent after that, but I always made sure I had a new short story ready for the annual competition–and not just because I got to take a day off from school. As the fifth of six kids, I grew up somewhat in the shadow of my older siblings, and to find my own thing to be good at was a real confidence booster.
But for the most part I set writing aside after high school. Oh, I still wrote here and there. I’m even a little embarrassed to say that as a missionary for my church, assigned for a six-month stint as a clerk in the mission headquarters, I wrote my first novel. But in my mind I was done with writing for anything but fun. I knew, knew that so very few people actually made a living as a writer. I had yet to meet anyone who had. I needed to find something else for a career, and satisfied my tale-spinning urges by playing our own version of an MMORPG with my sister back before there was any such thing (it was just the two of us, but we each played several dozen characters each, and it was all tabletop).
In my late twenties I finally got around to graduating from college, got married, started a family, went back to school for a masters degree, found a new RPG group, and generally became too busy to think much about writing other than some fan-fic for a gaming forum. Then we moved to Salt Lake City, Utah. My kids were getting older and requiring a little less attention, and I no longer had my game group. I had some free time again. I had heard of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) for years, and decided to give it a try on a lark.
The point of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words, about the size of a novella, or half the size of an novel, in a month. I grabbed an old idea inspired by an even older Enya song, and set out to write, on average, 1,700 words per day. I did it. I enjoyed it. I was hooked. Again.
I never did NaNoWriMo again. I didn’t have to. Motivation was no longer the problem. I wrote four more novels. About four years ago I decided I should start getting more serious about it and applied for a three-day workshop put on by a local university that brought in writers and editors from the professional community. Names I’d even heard of! It was the most amazing three days of my writing career.
It also killed it. I have struggled to write ever since. I’ve started at least a handful of novels, some multiple times, and not finished a single one. It’s been a painful experience. Writing was my dream, and yet my dream is dead. I’m not sure what happened. Did the workshop teach me to expect too much of myself, and thereby kill the fun? Perhaps. Has it become harder to find a consistent time to write? Definitely. Have I just not had ideas interesting enough? Maybe.
Or perhaps I’ve lost the fire. I may be remembering incorrectly or nostalgically, but I recall a time when I cared so much about my story that I couldn’t wait to write more. Now I do so more out of a sense of duty than anything else, and I get discouraged easily. Where I used to write 1000 words in a lunch-hour, I feel good about hammering out 500 (and I do mean hammering). I don’t understand it, and it makes me sad–mostly because I feel like abandoning one’s dream is tantamount to self-betrayal. And there are the people who believe in me who I’ll be letting down, which is worse than letting myself down, because I never believed in me to begin with.
But I’ve had it. I’m tired. Writing isn’t easy, of course, but it shouldn’t be this hard, either. It should be at least a little enjoyable. I think it’s time I set it aside, if only for a time.
I’m sorry this is a depressing post. I prefer to be motivational or inspirational, but sometimes you just have to admit that life isn’t always sunshine and roses. There are far too many aspects of my life that have lost their joy–maybe this is a midlife crisis. I don’t know. It’s not like I have a sudden desire to buy a red sportscar, or a motorcycle, or change careers, or start coloring my gray (I actually kinda like my gray–I like to pretend it makes me look wise and distinguished).
Maybe it’s just time I rediscovered what I do enjoy and focus on that for a while, with no expectations, no goals, just enjoy doing and being. My youngest son is fond of saying, “Whatever lights your boiler, Dad.” Well, perhaps it’s time I found out what that is. I could use a new head of steam.
What are your thoughts? How do you rekindle the joy you once felt in something once the fire has gone out?