Remembering to Write for Yourself

Many of us dream of writing for a living. Some of us have gotten paid for our work before, some of us haven’t. Some of us write during our day jobs. Others are lucky enough to have writing as their day job.

Right now, I’m sitting somewhere in the middle. I spend a lot of time working on assignments for other people: school, Penumbra and a couple things in the works that I don’t really want to talk about yet. Each of these assignments carves hours at a time out of my schedule. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve also spent hours of each day looking for writing jobs and examining markets.

A few days ago, I got an email from the lovely folks over at WriYe saying that they missed me and updating me on what’s going on there. I realized with some guilt that I’d neglected the site since late last year and went over there to pop my head in. After checking a few threads and making my guilty online confession and a list of my goals for the year, I stumbled upon a site called 750 words.

The idea behind 750words.com is that everyone should write three pages, or 750 words, a day to clear their heads. Originally intended to be a journalling tool, the website has a simple text editor where you can write, distraction free. The word counter sits in the bottom right hand corner, and when you hit 750 words, the counter turns from red to green. If you manage to write 750 words on this website several days in a row, you can get all kinds of badges which I’m sure will only increase with time.

This tool is great for any writer, especially the one who finds themselves spending all their time working on writing for other people. Your 750 words can be a journal entry, a character exercise, a synopsis for your novel, or anything else you want it to be. I’ve decided that only my most personal writing–my own sparse journalling mixed with character journals and probably a few exercises in flash fiction–is to be done on the 750 Words website. Since I’ve also set it up so that the website will email me reminders every day, I’ve put myself in an ideal position to write for myself every day.

Money and fame can often cloud our heads. We might spend seventy hours a week on a project that is earning us lots of money and forget to write for ourselves. Forgetting to write for ourselves can only lead to dissatisfaction with life and failure to meet the goals we set for ourselves. It’s important to remind ourselves every day that we got into this because we love to write, and that our long term goals of being novelists are just as important as the short-term goal of paying the bills.

Tonight, I’m going to use 750words.com to write a synopsis for my paranormal romance/fantasy story, tentatively named Birth of a Vampire. I’m planning to shop Birth of a Vampire around to the ebook publishers because of its awkward length at a little bit over 10, 000 words. I’ve been sitting on a two-paragraph rough draft of a synopsis for three weeks and it’s time to cut the crap. I need to make sure I honour my fiction as much as my non-fiction, even though non-fiction is more likely to pay the bills in the near future.

Always remember to write for yourself. Write because you love writing. Paying the bills, important as it might be, needs to be balanced with doing what you love.

Do you ever forget to write for yourself?