Not gonna lie, I’m having a freakin’ blast.
Mostly because yesterday this was my desk. Writing the next short story for the Jennie Manning Mysteries has just been…the word, I can’t find the word…awesome? Cool? Neat? No, just right. It feels just right.
You know that feeling you get when you’re writing and the words just jump out of your fingers. It’s like you think the words and they magically appear on the page. This is what happens when writing is effortless, when it’s fun.
There’s been blog posts and books and articles about planning stories. In fact, I teach a class about how to writing and put together your book. But here’s one thing that I am reminding my writers when we start class next month.
Writing is fun.
We forget that. In a world of publishing and self publishing and marketing and such, we think about how we want our writing careers to bloom. We want to be Neil Gaiman or Zadie Smith or Alice Walker. We want acclaim to our greatness like Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende. We want fame and fortune like that Patterson guy. We want all this and we get into this mindset of how to get there. Write. Market. Blog. Social Media. Oh, my goodness do I have to do another social media thing? What is Google +?
Really, this is what we need to keep in mind as writers: writing is fun. It really is that simple. Listen, I’ve been writing since middle school, I got my undergrad degree in a field where I had to write all the time. My graduate degree was in, wait for it, writing. And I’ve had this blog for six years and its all about, you guessed it, writing (and other things too).
But all that is nothing like the feeling of writing something you delight in and having other people delight in it as well. That’s a sexy feeling. That’s a feeling that I’d love to have everyday.
So, if you take nothing else from this post and from me as a teacher take this and share it. Writing is fun so I write to have fun.
Everything else is just noise.
Icess Fernandez Rojas 