Persevering in Writing

Writers.

If you’re on social media a lot, and if you follow writer pages, you’re sure to stumble across something related to the following checklist:

How to be a writer:

1) Have an idea
2) Outline everything about your idea
3) Sit down to write
4) Stand back up
5) Do everything in your power to avoid writing
6) Tweet about being excited to write
7) Sit down to write
8) Open Twitter
9) Stare shamefully at your blank word doc

— Alexander Pennington (@Authoralexp) August 26, 2022

I found that on Instagram the other day, though its original source was Twitter. And I share it because things like this always get me thinking.

I want to be a writer. (I know I probably announce that too much, but it’s been my dream since I was ten.) However, I often worry that that is all I’ll ever be able to say. “I want to be a writer.” Because the fact of the matter is that writers write.

I have an insanely long list of ideas, but I never get around to writing them. They’re outlined to various levels of detail, but only two of too many have a completed draft, and editing is harder to do than the original writing.

Perhaps the difficulty is that I work full-time, I have a family I want to spend time with, and I’m in grad school reading hundreds of pages a week (and writing research papers for the program) so it saps the drive for writing anything else in my spare time. (I was greatly tempted this week to take a week off of blogging, but I’m glad I decided to power through.) I wonder if maybe I’ll have more motivation to write when my schooling is done, but even then, our family might be bigger, and I’ll have to work a more demanding job to pay the bills, so I don’t know.

The more I think about it, now is the time to write. Even if it’s only a paragraph a day, it’s better than nothing. And, who knows? Somedays, just putting in the discipline to write a paragraph might morph into more than a paragraph.

I’m hoping to be able to take advantage of NaNoWriMo this year if only to do some networking with fellow writers in my area, but who knows, maybe by a miracle of personal discipline, I’ll be able to win.

You do what you set your mind to. I’m setting my mind to writing a small amount of fiction every day for the rest of the year.

What will you do?

In this with you.

Soli Deo Gloria

Thanks for reading.