Falling Back in Love with Writing

I went out for lunch with a writing friend recently, and we talked about our writing. How we shall be published one day, how we need to get our books finished, how we are closer than we’ve ever been. Then I said that I miss those days when I first started writing, when it was exciting, when I wanted to write all of the time. Where I thought this is it: I’ll write a book and get it published, within a year, perhaps two at the most (how deluded!). I’m not going to tell you how long ago that was, well maybe later in this post. I said to my friend that I didn't find writing exciting anymore, ever. 

I said: Why does it feel like a chore, why does it get pushed to the bottom of the list, over and over again? Why do I have to force myself to sit down and push out some words, or rejig those which are there already? 

And my friend said, she didn't think it was possible to feel like that after the initial excitement had faded. Now, I am an optimist, and whenever anyone says that something isn’t possible, I say why can’t it be? 

After that lunch, I decided that I was going to fall back in love with my writing, that although me and the writing have been together for almost twelve years, and things have got a bit stale, I need to give the writing a bit more attention, a bit more TLC, take it out for dinner, give it a glass of Champagne. So that’s what I did for a couple of weeks. I’ve gone back to how I used to do it at the beginning, because at least that way I was writing, always. I created a new spreadsheet for the outline, because the other one was a confusing mess. I created Draft 7, and returned to working like I used to, where once I get stuck on editing a draft, to save it as a new draft, and go back to the beginning, giving the story more depth by filling in bits of research and new scenes. 

So, me and my writing have rekindled our love, and hopefully it will last. And thank you to the RNA's New Writers' Scheme for giving me an annual deadline, which definitely helps.

On 10 July, I’m off to the RNA Conference at Queen Mary University in London, and I can’t wait! Here is my post from last year. 

An update on my neetsmarketing blog:

Sue Moorcroft’s post on Balancing Writing with Social Media was a hit (with 162 direct tweets from the post, and many more tweets and retweets). Thanks so much to Sue for writing such a brilliant post for my blog, and for promoting it on Twitter and Facebook.

Jane Holland will be a guest on 3 July with a post on Managing Different Twitter Accounts.

Julie Stock will be a guest on 11 September with a post on Book Covers.

Also, I’m running another course on 3 October 2015 in Guildford on social media for writers. Find out more via my website, and email me at anitajchapman at gmail dot com for further info.