August 5th, 2017. Me, post-fireworks. |
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
An Ode to HEA
Friday, April 16, 2021
Don't Write Every Day
I’m going to give you what I suspect is the most controversial piece of writing advice I will ever give:
Don’t write every day. (Or, perhaps more appropriately, you don’t have to write every day.)
This goes against the vast majority of popular writing advice, which often advocates for schedules, discipline, and seeking out inspiration rather than waiting for it to come to you. Already I can hear the throngs of writers in their outrage: “You won’t finish anything if you don’t write every day!” they cry. “If I only sat down to write when I was in the mood, I’d never get anything done!”
But of course, these writers are missing two key points:
1) The point of advice is to take what you need and leave the rest. (Ie: nobody is forcing you to take this advice if you don’t like it.)
2) Productivity is not the sole purpose of writing.
So I maintain my stance: you don’t have to write every day. You don’t need a schedule. You don’t need a daily or weekly or monthly progress goal to meet. You are allowed to simply write whenever you feel like it, or jump from project to project, whether you’ve finished it or not.
The key thing to remember is that writing is a choice, not a chore. And if it starts feeling like a chore, you need to pull back and let yourself choose when to start up again. You aren’t doing yourself any favours by forcing yourself to do it—just let it be fun.
I get that this advice sits on top of a very slippery slope. Consistency is key to improvement and progress. And considering that many writers (myself included) dream of turning their craft into a career, a part of that will eventually mean incorporating a certain level of discipline into your writing routine.
The problem is, at least when it comes to fiction, there is no secret job board, no 9-to-5 position we can just go out and apply for. Our writing starts on the side, during lunch breaks and on weekends. It doesn’t pay the bills, so in the meantime, we need to keep a day job. And a day job will inevitably decrease the amount of free time we have to spend on anything, including writing.
Writing is not my day job. I have a different job—a full-time, 40-hour-a-week job. I want writing to be my job, but I don’t want writing to be my second job. I don’t want a second job at all. I put in my hours, I get my cheque. I don’t want to spend all my free time stressing about another chore, I want to spend time doing whatever I want. Sometimes, that may be writing. I may spend all evening writing. Other times, I may spend all evening playing video games, watching movies, or reading a book. Some people live for The Hustle; I am not one of those people.
“Hobby” isn’t a bad word. You can let writing be a hobby, something you do when you’re in the mood. It doesn’t have to be a career that you’re actively pursuing all of the time. It can also be both—as your goals or life circumstances change, so too should your approach to writing. You should be changing your writing habits to fit your lifestyle, not the other way around.
The fact that “write every day” is so prevalent as advice is the very reason I feel the need to advocate for the opposite. My goal is to be your validation, the voice to reaffirm that the way you’re doing things—so long as it works for you—is good enough.
I don’t stress about writing every day. I set an alarm for a reminder, but if I’m busy, or tired, or just not in the mood, I’m not gonna worry about it. Will it take me longer to reach my ultimate goal? Yeah, obviously. But I’d rather take the extra time and enjoy myself than put myself under undue stress during the process. And if I can enjoy the process, isn’t that the better option?
Say it with me, kids: writing is a choice, not a chore. Let yourself have some fun.
Until later,
-Justyne
Friday, September 25, 2020
North Carolina
Friday, September 18, 2020
Magic
Friday, August 21, 2020
The Literary Canon is BALONEY
I had two problems with this:
1) I studied a different Shakespeare play in every year of high school, plus his sonnetts in my Intro English 1 class at university—there is definitely no lack of mandatory Shakespearean studies in the academic world.
2) Putting all issues of racism, sexism, and politics aside: who decides the literary canon? And who the hell decided it was so important?
(It's also worth noting that UCLA does require one course in each of four different historical periods, one of which will almost certainly cover Shakespeare, so the reliability of this creator is....questionable, at best. But I digress.)
In case you've forgotten: I was an English major. I didn't like English at first; we read Beowulf, sonnets, Shakespeare, and all the other old and stuffy material that is consistently considered part of some overarching and universal "Literary Canon." I hated the literary canon. It was boring, it was hard to understand, and—no matter what my high school English teacher said—I just couldn't see how studying stuff written over a hundred years ago could possibly help my writing skills in the present day.
But in the latter half of my studies, I started taking courses studying things like fairy tales, graphic novels, Disney movies. Almost immediately, I started enjoying my studies more. I was also frequently met with incredulous expressions and questions of amazement whenever I detailed my academic escapades. And I'll admit—writing a research paper analyzing themes of romance and sacrifice in Tangled and The Little Mermaid hardly felt like "real" school.
One of my absolute favourite courses in my degree was called "Popular Literature and Film." My professor emphasized, over and over, that you can do a close reading analysis on anything—anything. We started with Inside Out and The Marvelous Land of Oz, and worked our way to Carrie and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The point of the class was to see that there is meaning in everything, not just in "literary" media.
But they dig deep because they care. They're motivated, they're interested, so they huddle over media over and over and over again, looking for any scrap of meaning they can find.
I think sometimes people are hesitant to extend media and literature studies beyond the accepted literary canon because there's this ongoing perception that entertainment is incompatible with artistic integrity. Or that there's a departure in quality between "good" (ie: "conventionally literary") books and stuff designed to entertain the masses—like the difference between an indie, avant-garde film and a blockbuster action flick.
But you can read something BOTH for its critical, thought-provoking content AND still read it as simply enjoyable. I learned more about how to think critically when I was thinking about media that I enjoyed, rather than media that came with a Spark Notes study guide. In fact, I'd argue that learning to think critically about media you enjoy at face value can be far more beneficial than looking for the same Great Gatsby symbolism that everyone else has already found.
I think it's increasingly important that we don't start with the stuffy, the hard, and the boring; we should be focusing on the light, the fun, and the interesting. All throughout high school, I think I studied maybe one book that I liked. And don't get me wrong, university had more than its fair share of bad books—but I also had the priviledge of both finding and studying books that I genuinely enjoyed, which ultimately resulted in papers that (now, outside of the bleary, nocturnal habits of a procrastinating student) I'm actually kind of proud of.
Monday, March 2, 2020
MFM: Shadows Among Smoke
Friday, December 13, 2019
The Truth About Your Dream Job
- It was fun.
- Everyone told me I was good at it.
- I wanted to live a mythical lifestyle in which I could sit at home in my pyjamas all day.
I grew up believing that if I had a job I loved, it would never feel like work. But there’s an integral problem with pursuing a creative career: you start as a hobby, when the only motivation is fun and personal fullfillment. Once you add pressure--the pressure to succeed, the pressure to improve, the pressure to make money--it starts to lose its fun. And once you start trying to calculate project marketability, and even outright avoiding projects you deem to be unmarketable...well, there goes most of the fulfillment, too.
For a long time, I thought that the solution to my fatal flaw was to treat writing like a real job. If I gave myself deadlines, and approached my projects with discipline, maybe I'd be able to power thorugh to the other side--even if there was no paycheque waiting for me. But in doing so, I began to ignore my strongest medium for self-expression and creative freedom, instead seeing the craft exclusively as a skill set to be monetized. I started worrying that I wasn't being productive enough, or making the amount of progress I thought I should have achieved. I stopped allowing myself the chance to step back when it stopped being fun; instead, I pushed myself harder. This isn't even REAL work, I told myself. You love this, after all.
All the while, there was a tiny voice inside my head asking--if I can't even muster the motivation to do this now, when all expectations are my own and every creative decision is entirely mine, how could I possibly do this for the rest of my life? Is this what my dream job is supposed to look like?
Suddenly, writing was the scariest and hardest thing to do. I've wanted to be a writer since I was nine. For the majority of my life, I've had one goal: to get published. It's been my motivation, my driving force, the focus of every tattered journal and every daydream for over half of my life. I've dedicated my life to building these skills from the ground up. So when that driving force is questioned, when I start to wonder if this is really for me or really what I want to do--it's scary as hell.
So I stopped. I avoided it. It was easier to hide than to face the reality that I might not be the writer I thought I was. But y'know what?
I came back. I may have taken a little longer, maybe eased back in a little hesitantly. But I always come back. I can never stay away for very long.
The idea that you'll "never work a day in your life" is bullshit. Writing is work. Creativity is work. At the end of the day, it's still a job, and like any job, there will be as many good days as there are bad days. (If you're lucky, you'll get more of the good ones.) It’s the good days that remind me why I want to do this, why I keep showing up. It’s the satisfaction of stringing together that perfect sentence, the thrill of expressing my thoughts in ~JUST~ the right way. Just because I get tired, fed up, frustrated by the anarchic writing process, doesn’t mean I'm any less of a writer. Waking up and deciding that I’m not in the mood to write doesn’t make me any less of a writer. The bad days aren’t going to make me stop showing up.
But still, I wake up knowing that I am a writer, regardless of how often I get to do it or how often I even want to do it. I wake up knowing that once I get started, more often than not, it'll get easier. I know I'm the same writer if I write one word or one thousand words or no words at all.
And more importantly, I wake up knowing that writing is not my defining characteristic--it's just one tiny piece of the whole.
Until later,
- Justyne