Author: Betsy Horvath

My mother is a wonderful artist. She paints in acryllics and oils and I think she is just brilliantly talented. Over the years she’s produced many, many beautiful things. She’s sold a lot of her work, but she’s never really broken out and made her painting more than a hobby. She’s never taken her art to the next level.

There are a lot of reasons for that, the primary one being that she really didn’t WANT her painting to be more than a hobby. That’s absolutely fine with me. If she’s happy, I’m happy.

But as I try to take my writing to the next step, I’m trying to figure out what really made the difference. What made my mother a comfortable hobbyist and not someone striving for more? If she wanted to take her painting to the next level, what changes in habits and attitudes would she need to have made?

One big thing I’ve noticed is consistency. My mother never paints unless she feels like it. She can go weeks, months, or even years without lifting a paintbrush. She might produce other artistic-type things during those dry spells, but she’s not producing paintings. She’s not really practicing her art.

And because she never paints unless she feels like painting, she’s never really learned how to produce regardless of her feelings or her life circumstances.

I think that’s fine for a hobbyist. What’s the point of a hobby if you aren’t in the mood for it? But it seems to me that if you want to take your hobby to the next level then you need to do it whether you’re in the mood or not.

In the same way that you go to work whether you feel like it or not, you need to practice your art – whatever that art may be – whether you feel like it or not. If you don’t go to work because you don’t feel like it, you eventually lose your job. If you don’t practice your art because you don’t feel like it, you eventually lose your art. And every time you lose it, every time you step out of the stream of consistent practice, it takes longer to get the juices flowing again.

Believe me. I know.

So, I’ve decided that I will touch my writing every day, whether I feel like it or not. I set a ridiculously low word-count goal for myself because the important thing at this point is not volume but consistency. I’ve been practicing this for the last two months. No matter how I feel, no matter what kind of day I’ve had, no matter what I’m worried about, I touch my writing.

I’ve been finding that it’s working. Most days I write far more than my ridiculously low word count goal. Touching the WIP every day has kept it in the forefront of my mind and its kept the juices flowing. I highly recommend it.

Besides, if you can be consistent over the holidays, I figure you’re golden. 😀

 

The original title of this post was “It Should Be Fun”. I was planning on talking about how writing needs to be enjoyable. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that wasn’t quite what I believe.

It’s not that writing shouldn’t be fun. It’s that “fun” is too weak a word for what writing is. And writing is not always “fun” in the “it’s party time” sense. I don’t think it should be.

Writing should be a passion. The passion for telling a story is what drives you back to your computer or notepad day after day, even when you’ve hit a roadblock. Even when you just want to play video games.  The passion makes you despair at what you’ve written, and makes you strive to be better.  The passion is what hooks you and keeps you at it until you are pummeled into submission.

Writing should be intense. I don’t care what you’re writing, whether it be a children’s book, a romantic comedy, a thriller, or the next War and Peace, writing is an intense experience. Something about the act of creating a story will bring forward emotions and thoughts you might not wish to face. You are the god or goddess of your writing universe and that, my friends, is an intense and often wrenching experience.

Writing should be important. Writing should be taken seriously. What you write might not be serious, but the act of creation is serious. This is a gift that you are giving to yourself and to the other people who will read what you’ve written. It should have importance in your life because it is miraculous. If done correctly, other people will see what you see, hear what you hear, feel what you feel. Being a writer, creation of any kind, is an awesome privilege.

Writing should be gratifying. There is such gratification in watching something you’ve created come to life in your hands. There’s nothing like coming up on a roadblock in your story and finding your way around it. There’s absolutely nothing like looking back at your story and thinking “I wrote that. That world did not exist, but now it does. That story was not told, but now it is.”  When you write, you take things you’ve observed and heard and internalize them, then mold them into something else like a kid in a mud puddle.

And, finally….

Writing should be fun.