Make Writing Fun Again

We all know the saying, “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.”

You know what?

It’s bullsh*t.

You know why?

Because every time you turn something that you love into a money-making endeavor, it’s no longer something that you love. Suddenly, it becomes work. At least, that’s what my experience has been.

For years, I have used the two things I love to do most in this world as my main source of income: reading and writing. I have beta read, edited, written, and ghost written more pages than I can count. Mind you, these endeavors have not made me rich by any means. However, they have been enough to keep my head floating above water—barely.

At first, this arrangement was satisfying. I got to read works by new writers and help them improve their writing as well get some writing done myself, even if it wasn’t my own material. After a while, it became a daunting task. There were too many pages to read, too many pages to write, and the expectations were high.

Get this done now, get that done yesterday, have three assignments prepared all at once…

My passion had become work. The spark that had once driven my reading and writing had flown out the window. All the time that I used to have for reading and writing for pleasure had disappeared, buried somewhere beneath all my work.

Unfortunately, with that spark went my imagination. Lately, I struggle to harvest the creativity that I once had while reading and writing. My writing has especially suffered from this imagination drought. Where I could once drift off into my own mind, get lost in the depths of worlds of my own creation, I now grasp at nothing but a void. It takes me hours to think up an idea or a sentence—if it will come to me at all.

That is why my aspirations as a Vocal creator this year are simple: make writing fun again.

Yes, I want to win challenges. Yes, I want to get more reads, more subscribers, and more earnings. All of those would be perks. However, none of those will help me to regain my writing spark. Making writing fun again will.

What does making writing fun again look like?

1) It’s writing what I want to write, no matter what.

2) It’s ignoring the critics when they don’t have anything productive to say and not taking anything that anyone says too personally.

3) It’s not being down on myself if I do enter a challenge and don’t happen to win anything.

4) It’s writing as often as possible while not being mad at myself just because I didn’t write one day—or even a week.

5) It’s writing because I want to write, not because I feel like I have to write for monetary reasons.

That last point is, perhaps, the most important point of all. I need money; we all do. That’s probably a big part of the reason why we all joined Vocal, because we liked the idea of getting even a few cents whenever someone read our writing. However, it shouldn’t be a driving force behind our writing. Then it becomes work. Work, no matter how it might have started out, just isn’t fun after a while. It’s work.

Will I continue to use my reading and writing skills to earn money? Of course. I have to eat. However, I will use Vocal this year to work towards making writing as fun as it was before I started using it as a source of income. Vocal is where I will reclaim my imagination, one story—or poem or essay—at a time.