Fall hopelessly in love with writing. When you do, success will find you.
Writing is one of the most enjoyable and rewarding forms of art, in my opinion. It involves transporting every sense into another world, and inhabiting said world long enough to experience and extract a story. For me, it is a deeply intimate, profoundly emotional, and borderline spiritual practice.
Throughout high school, writing was my safe haven and my home. Seventy-percent of the time, part of me was in some distant elsewhere, and I have the lackluster algebra grades to prove it. Words flowed from me like water, because they were my portals. They were gaping gateways into the aether in the moment, and archives of my adventures afterwards.
I had a daily writing practice, but not on purpose. Most days, I’d have to drag myself away from the keyboard. I never bothered with word count, working hours, or even quality. Writing was freedom. Through it, I was unleashed into an imaginal realm brimming with possibilities.
The Monetization of Art
In college, I came to realize that living on Earth costs a lot. For years, art nourished my soul. Now, I needed it to nourish my physical form as well. I have a lot of thoughts on the monetization of art. On one hand, I believe it is truly wonderful that people can make money by engaging with and sharing their passions. We are rewarded for devoting to our dreams and following through with goals. Still, with monetization comes a new layer of demands. When art nourishes, more art means more nourishment. When our relationship to art changes, our relationship with making art changes.
Most of the art and writing tips I come across online relate exclusively to productivity. Articles and YouTube videos call our attention by claiming a book can be written in twenty-four hours. They dangle the secret to five thousand words a day like a carrot on a string. They pledge to sharpen our focus, speed up our process, and help us plow through plot points with feral vigor.
For some time, I wholeheartedly gave into this mindset. I formed a very clear vision of what a productive day looked like. If I couldn’t conjure up a polished chapter between three and five thousand words within twelve hours, I called myself a failure. If my character sheets, plot diagrams, and arc trackers were not concisely packaged and built for systematic updates, I saw myself as a fraud. Worst of all, I worried that if I lacked the motivation to power through book-after-book with maximum efficiency, I didn’t deserve a place in the literary world. I didn’t deserve to pick up my pen, or to share my musings with others.
This headspace was obviously unsustainable. My writing became dry and essentialist. The craft became intimidating. Prose that once flourished with vast, thoughtful descriptions were reduced to two sentence summaries, and characters that once came alive on and off the page devolved into lifeless, line-delivering husks. I overburdened myself with hunts for deeper meanings that could appeal to the masses, lived in fear of judgment from a nonexistent audience, and tried to make my work as “sellable” as possible. In doing so, I locked my imagination in a windowless, monochromatic box.
Was I writing quickly? Yes. Was I crafting technically effective stories? Yes. Did I enjoy any part of the process? Absolutely not.
It took three attempts with this productivity-driven routine for me to give up. Convinced my zest for writing was a childhood high and nothing more, I closed my computer and started looking into other options. Soon after, I felt a hollowness festering in my soul. There was a hole in my heart created by the absence of intergalactic adventures. It felt like mourning a loved one, but nothing actually died. There was no grave to place flowers on, because writing was still very much alive in me.
So, I opened up Google Docs on my cell phone instead of my laptop, and I began.
Passion Ignites Productivity
Just like when I’d written fan fiction under my comforter at twelve years old, I tapped away on a tiny screen at the speed of light. At last, I created the world I wanted to escape to, the place that had been calling to me. I listened to the characters whispering in my ear, and spent time truly getting to know them. I let myself daydream on paper. I raced to the story daily, desperate to reconvene with the gang and rejoin the adventure.
When I wasn’t writing, I was dreaming of it. I made silly playlists, compiled the cast’s favorite foods, and even spent some time baking them so we could eat together. I meandered through my local Sephora, scoping out the perfume aisle for their favorite scents. I lingered in the details no reader would ever know because they were too minor to place in a plot. Still, the characters were real to me, and that bled into the parts of them that made it to the page.
In three months, I had a fully realized novel, and it was this novel that got me literary representation.
Leave productivity culture behind, release your fears, and write like no one is watching. Be positively savage in your creative endeavors. Shed the layers of domestication, and just be yourself on and off the page. Write those outlandish sentences that pop into your head. Go bananas in your action scenes. Be cliché, unashamed, and ultra-saccharine in your romance. Once you dissolve the fear of criticism, you’ll be unstoppable. Even better, your ability to be completely authentic may inspire others to do the same.
Don’t be afraid to spend a lot of time on the little things. Construct a presentation showcasing your characters’ most beloved perfumes. Why might your main insist on wearing lavender and vanilla? Leather and coffee grinds? Gardenia and white tea? Organize a Pinterest board of memes your cast would send to one another. Does one constantly berate the group for their sporadic responses? Might a nonsensical meme about broccoli bring a smile to the dad friend’s face? Contemplate what Hogwarts House, Divergent Faction, or Hunger Games District each would belong to. Who would choose Dauntless instantly? Who would be sent to Hufflepuff without a second thought?
Real human beings do this because real life isn’t about efficiency. Real life is about savoring each moment and experience. Real life is filled with silly questions about colors, socks, music genres, and more. It is a beautiful amalgamation of time spent on the random intricacies that make us feel like, well, us.
Even the most chilling thriller has a human being at its heart. That human being has a favorite animal and a beloved childhood movie. The fact that they wanted to be a shark when they were younger might not matter in the story, but it does matter. Even the most otherworldly fantasy romance has real people with real pasts. Did your main character ever take a quiz to determine what wing style best fits their personality? Do they have a favorite insect? Why might they be comfortable having a dragon as a pet, but not a unicorn?
Productivity-centered writing practices focus on maximizing word count and plot effectiveness while minimizing time spent engaging with the material. I am inclined to ask… what is the point of that?
I started writing because there were faraway worlds I wished to live in, distant characters I yearned to befriend, and experiences I wanted to have beyond the confines of my Earth-tethered form. I wanted to dissolve into fictional realms until the lines between my characters and I blurred. Writing entails living lives in other places. Lives are meant to be lived, not raced through.
Spend time with your characters. Craft their stories lovingly and with intention. Some days, you will write fifty words over the course of eight hours. Others, you will write ten thousand in a sitting. The less pressure you put on yourself, the more you’ll love your art again. The more you love your art, the more you’ll want to create.
Furthermore, the readers who align with your work don’t want the most statistically perfect story. They don’t want a formulaic, mathematical narrative constructed with profit ahead of passion. They want to feel your love through the pages, to go on an extraordinary adventure beside you. Don’t worry about pleasing the world with your work. Just be unabashedly yourself, and the people meant to find you will.
Art is monetizeable, and that is a gift. However, it isn’t just about making money, and it never will be. Writing, at its core, is meant to serve the writer. It is meant to help you live out your dreams and desires, explore the depths of your soul, and process your experiences here and beyond. When your writing touches the lives of others, it will be profound and beautiful. Still, it’ll only serve them as well as it served you. Books written for paychecks alone stick out like soulless sore thumbs. Books that transport their writer to another universe do the same for their readers.
Write for fun, write for you, and trust me, you’ll write. Productivity will be a byproduct of doing something you love enough to do nonstop.
Thank you so much for reading! I truly hope this article filled you with happiness, hope, and inspiration! Losing my way in writing was a big step in appreciating it tenfold by the time I found the path back home. ♡
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