Who else is still sticking to their New Year's resolution right now? Ever since I lost 50 pounds last year, I've been wanting to get back into it. It's been a rough start but I got back out there again for a walk today.
I'm sure I would have enjoyed it more if I didn't live in Illinois. It's February and already turning humid as hell. What gives?
Oh well. I'm back inside now and ready to get to work. The past week or so has been a complete disaster, struggling to get through a bout of depression. And then my keyboard quit working on my laptop! But not at an ordinary, sensible time of day. Oh no. It quit at 1 a.m. After two and a half hours of attempted fixes, I went to Walmart and bought a plug-in keyboard. THEN, I came back home and stayed up until 7 a.m. to make up for all that lost time. Oh, but the fun didn't end there! The day before yesterday, and into yesterday, I stayed up for 23 hours straight to get a project done for a client. And then I slept for 9 hours. Cassie the Editor Bird was not happy that I wasn't at her beck and call for most of the day. However, we're getting back into our normal routine and Cassie is currently drinking out of my water glass.
Like I was saying in my previous post, writing isn't the hardest job in the world...but that doesn't mean it can't be hard. EVERY job is hard at some point. It's just that many aren't worth the struggle.
Writing is, if you love it. And when you hate it. It isn't about inspiration and passion, although those things certainly exist. However, if you want it to be a job, you need this one thing above all else: stubbornness.
Some might call it determination, in favor of using a prettier word, but it is, at its heart, pure stubbornness. It's a refusal to back down, even when you would rather be doing anything else. It's forcing your fingers to move even when you have your head thrown back with exasperation at just how stupid your story sounds right about now. It's tossing all your bodily needs out the window for a moment to get this one more paragraph down.
It's stubbornness. You need it, because no one is making you write. It's your responsibility, and if the urge never goes away, if you're always aware of it and would be miserable if you never wrote another thing for the rest of your life...then you are a writer and you will return to it time and time again no matter how dramatically you gave up on it last time.
That's writing.
That's stubbornness.
They're one and the same.
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