“Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears
that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.”
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Once winter hits and the cold wind blows, if you are anything like me, all you want to do is put your big fuzzy slippered feet up, crank back the Lazy Boy a notch or two, grab a mug of sweet Chai tea and some comfort food, then settle in with a good book while the world outside whirls its manic, social-media-crazed way without you.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
But. If you are also like me and call yourself a ‘writer’, then….well….there is a certain degree of writing that is required to live up to it.
Writers. Must. Write.
And when I don’t have a serious project with built-in deadlines underway, well then…forcing myself to scrabble words on the page can be brutal. When external motivation is absent, I have to dig deep.
When I am teaching, one of the most common comments I hear is the quietly apologetic, “Well…I’m not a REAL writer…”. Those who know me know that I have something to say to that.
A number of years ago, I decided to run a marathon. I was not much of a runner at the time, so I knew it would require time, tears, physical endurance and emotional commitment. Trust me when I say that crossing the finish line did not make me a marathoner. The inner commitment required to drag my butt for over 1000 rugged kilometres in 20-odd weeks made me a marathoner. Training my body to run a distance of 42 km made me a marathoner, not the medal I received at the end.
Public recognition and affirmation doesn’t make a writer in my mind. What makes a true writer are all the solitary hours put into practicing and honing the craft.
The willingness to sacrifice time, learn from others, to push personal limits and take chances. To study.
What makes a writer are the many hours we spend connecting with ourselves and our own minds. Of discovering what we think about and how we feel about it and how we see our world. The stacks of journals and notebooks, tenderly and honestly filled. Of the painstaking research and writing and rewriting required to craft the words others may want to read.
Whether your work is published is really irrelevant to defining yourself. What you believe in your heart is what matters.
So, if you are serious about writing (or any other pursuit), you must have a good heart-to-heart talk with yourself. The first question to ask is, “Is this important enough to me to become a priority in my life?” Because writing asks for and expects sacrifice.
There are dozens of methods to motivate ourselves to write, but each one starts with the heart. First and foremost, be honest. We live in a world that glorifies ‘Easy’. How committed are you, really? And are you willing to pay the cost? If not right now, that’s okay. Your time will come.
But if so, then for heaven’s sake, just get on with it and start cranking. Be the writer you are in your heart.
And if you still need some external motivation, and you live in my neighbourhood, then check out my February Writing Workshop Series. It might be just the boost you need.
Thanks for the motivational boost, Deborah. All this is so true.
Bruce
And I should also have noted that the most common words I hear from writers who have been published and paid for their work is, “I feel like such a fake.”
I think that because everyone writes to some extent every day, we are all guilty of devaluing the ‘craft of writing’.
Well, you most certainly ARE a writer. This piece really gels about the true efforts of the task. I will keep on trucking.
good sound words.
Hi Deborah. There is also the agony of: “why is this even important?” Then I think about how critical writing and reading (passing on thoughts) are to the very existance of humanity. I am reading my Great-Aunt’s diaries as part of a university project… her words are simple and her activities could even be seen as mundane, but if she had not written them down, how would we know about her life, her thoughts, her reality? Thanks for your post. Jane