Focus on your desire to write, not your unit sales

I've linked to Ask Cary here before, but once again he has written beautifully about writing and the writing life, so I can't help but share. This time, he talks about how writers who are down on their work should focus on what brought them to dream about becoming a writer, not some outside measure of success (publication, number of readers, etc.).

Like many writers, what brought me to writing was the idea of expressing myself, the truths about my life, and, I think, life in general. Personally I find it very hard to talk about these concepts directly, so writing about fictional characters who are dealing with them is the safest, best way for me to get those ideas across to others. What I've learned as I've written is that often times the writing also helps me learn the truths about myself that are buried fairly deep, which I wouldn't get to if I didn't take the time to think, reflect, write, and revise.

How about you? What brought you to writing? What keeps you going?

I'll leave you with a quote from Cary that touched me:

...Soon I realized that there were other secret languages and other people who could read these secret languages. That was the vision that excited me and made me want to be a writer: I wanted to find a secret voice within myself like the one Dylan Thomas had found, and begin speaking it and see if anyone could understand me. To this day, when I grow weak and tired, I seek that primary thrill of adolescence; I try to re-create for myself my own strange, secret language.

Why I write

A fellow writer told me about a dream she recently had where she just published a piece of writing, and then said to a friend, "I'm grateful for the work but I know that when it finally gets published, that good feeling is pretty fleeting." And I know from experience that that sentiment is true. With every goal I reach, I feel good for a fraction of the time that it took to get there.

So why bother writing? I had a glimpse of my answer on Sunday. After writing for a few hours--the miserable kind of writing, where I grumbled the whole time, wondering what the f I was doing, wondering why I don't just give up and spend my time, oh, making cocktails--I had my very own Ah-Ha moment. Something clicked in my story. I got perspective and saw that my way into the story was through using my character's perception of the setting (the hospital) to mirror my character's feelings (confusion and anger about her marriage).

It felt so good to get those pieces to click! As good as meeting any external goal (graduating from a degree program, publishing a newspaper story) has ever felt. And it's lasted a lot longer, too. In fact, I'm still riding on the feeling, which has allowed me to write a little bit of the story each day without grumbling and wanting a drink.

So that's why I write. For the feeling that comes from finally--finally!--making a story work.

Though getting published would be nice, too. :)

I'd love to hear why you write. Leave a comment.