Member-only story
Writing is Only Half the Battle
Writing is easy; finishing is so much harder. But it matters.
It’s easy to call yourself a writer, if that’s what you want to be. It feels good to put it in your bio: on Medium, and Twitter, in the signature line of your email, and every other corner of the internet where you can squeeze it in — maybe with a little book emoji or a typewriter emoji, just to be cute.
It can also come with a lot of perks, especially a whole slew of online writing communities, complete with new friends, classes and webinars and festivals to attend, and organizations to join with all their pretty little acronyms (SCBWI! RWA! SFWA!).
And being a writer is busy work: you’ve got to build a website, develop a social media following, build your mailing list, learn from the masters about how to write, figure out how to get an agent, or else, how to master the witchcraft that is self-publishing. You’ve got to crack the Amazon code.
It’s so easy to not write.
Oh, pardon me, what am I saying?
Of course you write.
You’ve got a few dozen manuscripts that you’ve started. All of these bright and shiny ideas that absolutely captured your heart. Characters that you fell in love with.
It was a fever dream at first. It was love at first sight.
And then, somewhere between 10,000–25,000 words into the project, it became hard. The light was gone. Writing the story stopped being fun, and it felt like work. The characters stopped being coöperative; became little assholes who got in the way of your brilliant story. They started having other ideas.
You didn’t sign up for something that was hard. Writing’s supposed to be fun, relaxing, and lucrative. If you needed a pain in the ass, you’d go work retail. But, luckily, you’ve got a shiny, new idea. So you don’t have to work retail or deal with this difficult problem child of a story.
That’s what the shelf is for.
You’re writing — by God, you’re writing. So what if nothing ever gets finished? You’re writing. You’re doing all of the other writer business that you’re supposed to do.
