Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47419
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

As Emerson said, 'Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm' - and some significant hard graft. Writing that aims to be read can be difficult, frustrating and so forth, but the rewards, should it ever be read, are not guaranteed and certainly not commensurate with the work involved.

For me, writing is its own reward. It's how I communicate with myself. I have written a daily journal for decades and it fascinates me to read back on the hopes and anxieties of past selves, and to see where progress has been made in how I understand myself and the world I inhabit: even to identify burgeoning wisdom. I doubt anyone else will read these journals (I hope not anyway, at least during my lifetime), but these are the pages on which I explore ideas and hone both my writing and my life skills.

As well as that mundane daily practice, I write for different platforms and for my Master's Degree, both fiction and non-fiction. Some of the latter is in the process of being published, but that has taken a very long time. Everything I have written has got me to this point, of having the confidence to put it up for publication, of sending my little darlings into the great wide world, to succeed or fail.

But regardless of whether I am ever read by more than my beta readers, _not_ writing is not a sustainable way of living for me. Writing is like breathing - it's harder if I have a cold or am climbing four flights of stairs, but I can't not do it.

Original score: 3