#3: Should You Give up on Being a Writer? This might mean scheduling specific times during each week to work on your project. Recommit to the project – tell yourself you’ll see it through, and make a plan so that can happen.Does anything there excite you? You might well find yourself engrossed – and you may be surprised that there are sentences, paragraphs, whole pages that you don’t even remember writing. Read over the material that you’ve already produced.If you’re still at least a little bit in love with your project, though, don’t quit just because life’s gotten in the way. I went through two blogs on topics that didn’t really inspire me for long, before starting Aliventures (where I’ve now been blogging for six years). If you’ve genuinely lost interest, then quit and start something new. Or you’ve been working on a non-fiction manuscript for years now. Or you started a blog, posted regularly for two months, but life got busy. Maybe you got ten chapters into a novel, only to run out of steam, and plot. If you’ve stalled on a project, it’s easy to start thinking about giving up. #2: Should You Give Up on Your Work in Progress? The problem is that one skipped session usually leads to another – and the longer you spend away from your work, the more resistance you’ll feel toward getting started again. Of course, one skipped session isn’t going to derail your project – just like one cupcake isn’t going to ruin your diet. You might want to spend a few extra minutes journaling about why you’re feeling blocked, or what’s going on in the rest of your life. Do you want to carry on? If you still really don’t feel like writing, stop. You can do anything for five minutes, however much you don’t feel like it initially. Set a timer for five minutes, and write-without deleting!-until your time is up.Often, though, the reluctance is because you’re tired or in a bad mood or overwhelmed. If you’ve hit a block in your work-in-progress, for instance, perhaps you need to take a step back and do some extra planning. Occasionally, this might be the right choice. You’re feeling very, very tempted to give up and try again tomorrow. Maybe you wrote a sentence or two, hated them, and promptly deleted them. Twenty minutes into your planned writing hour, you’ve accomplished precisely nothing. #1: Should You Give Up on a Writing Session? Here’s how to decide when to stick with it and when to quit, whether you’re considering giving up on a single project, or writing altogether. (After all, since you’re reading this post, it’s a safe bet that deep down you don’t want to give up.) A week later, or a month later, or five years later, you find yourself wishing you’d just stuck with writing a little longer. There’s no point carrying doggedly on with a project that you’ve long ago lost all interest in.īut often, quitting isn’t the right choice. Sometimes, of course, quitting is sensible. I’ve been writing for a living for eight years now, and writing novels for far longer, and I still find myself questioning. … and maybe you do give up, for a day or a month or even years – but writing draws you back in. “ I’m too old (or too young) to be a writer.” It can feel like a relentless, unrewarding slog.Īnd those doubts (that were at the back of your mind all along) start getting louder: However much you love writing, it’s hard at times. You feel like getting up and walking away from your writing… and never coming back. You’re at your desk, and the words just aren’t flowing. Ali has been writing for a living for eight years, and she blogs weekly about the art, craft, and business of writing on her site Aliventures.
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