#NaNoWriMo 2021: Neither Job Nor Vacation
What matters isn’t how much money writing makes you, but how it transforms your life.
With today’s newsletter, I want to to revisit some advice from 2019. The original email references Lewis Richmond’s Work as a Spiritual Practice, a book which isn’t strictly relevant to the point I want to make just now, but which I’ve found tremendously helpful and encourage you to read when you get the chance.
I imagine some NaNoWriMo participants see this month as an escape, a way to temporarily break free of the monotony of their daily routines and allow themselves a creative indulgence. It’s fun, but come December they plan to resume their normal schedules—oh, they might open the manuscript document once in a while, if they can find some spare time, but they’re not in any rush to get it published, necessarily. It’s enough to know they could write a story in a month, and knowing that about themselves makes the other eleven months a little easier in ways that they may not even be able to talk about consciously.
As a professional writer and editor, I suppose I’m supposed to believe that “nobody but a blockhead ever wrote for money,” but, honestly, over the years I’ve come to appreciate the value of writing as an edifying hobby, the same way we might treat other creative pursuits, like woodworking or learning to play a guitar. It’s okay if your writing isn’t “professional,” and it’s okay if it never becomes “professional.” What matters isn’t how much money writing makes you, but how it transforms your life.
When you embrace that notion, you come to a point where your writing practice doesn’t need to be a lucrative career—but it also doesn’t have to be your stolen moments of joy, either. What if you saw this as an opportunity to rebuild your life, starting with one small section? What if you took the attitudes you cultivate during your writing practice—the pursuit of what truly matters to you, the effort to look at what you’re doing honestly and mindfully, the commitment to ongoing development—and began to apply them to other aspects of your life as well?
Who would you be, then?