Falling out of love with our writing is something that happens to most writers, and not just in mid-career. We fall out of love with nearly each project and, especially when writing a novel, we likely do so many times. As is the case with any long-term marriage, there are bland days when we wonder why we started this damn thing in the first place. Or, even worse, we fight with a story that isn’t working. We fight and we fight until we have no energy left for it. We think of giving up and leaving the project altogether. Sometimes, as in a bad marriage, we should leave it. Some projects are just practice, where we learn a thing or two, like the relationships of our twenties, when we experiment with lovers until we find a good match.
Even when we do find that good match -- the writing project that “fits” -- there will be days when we want to give up, when we seem to have fallen out of love. How do we heal our relationship with our project or with our writing life in general? How do we reignite that spark?
I’m not entirely sure, but I think I’m beginning to figure it out. I believe the key to keeping any long-term relationship thriving lies in making time for that love, and in bringing back play. Just as we do with our partners, we need to make the time to be with our writing. We often fall out of love with our writing simply because we don’t have the energy for it. When we’re not at work, we’re chasing our kids or overloaded by domestic demands. It’s hard enough to find time to romance our partners, much less our writing.
If that writing life is important to us, however, then we must find that time and energy to romance it, almost daily. I say almost as breaks are important. We need time away from our kids and lovers to charge up, to appreciate them. The same is true of writing. To stay in love with writing, however, we need to make it a daily habit, one we return to because we want to, because we’re driven to, not because we have to. Here was where I ran into trouble in my forties. Between my responsibilities as a parent to four kids, as a daughter to aging parents, as a teacher, and as a wife, I had very little time left to romance my writing.
I had also lost the ability to view my writing as play. As pros, we often come to think of our writing as work, and defend it as such, as something we must do, we should do. There’s nothing like a “should” to take the joy out of any activity. Writers often ask me how I stay disciplined, how I keep writing. I tell them I do my best not to discipline myself to write. When I make it work, it feels like work. Despite what I told these writers, however, writing had become work for me. Writing was how I made my living. I wrote for a purpose now, and not for play. And so, I lost energy for it. My writing had stalled.
I see the importance of play at work most keenly with my children. My two youngest love to write. My youngest son had two novels on the go before the age of twelve. My daughter writes poetry and picture books for fun. For fun. These kids aren’t worrying about getting published, or finding an agent, or getting decent reviews. They are writing because … well, because. They are writing for no other purpose other than to play.
