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When writing just isn't bringing you joy?

You’re supposed to feel joy when writing?
It’s always an agonizing emotional rollercoaster for me. I just stick with it because I enjoy reading the end result since I write the kind of stuff I like reading. Even if it sucks.

Maybe the medium is what’s boring you. Maybe you should try writing a film script or episodic shorts - mix things up. Get out of your comfort zone.

Trust me, it’s the same for me too. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes I hate it. I think that’s normal. It’s not feeling *anything* that to me seems like the omen of something bad. That’s why I quit that last project.
 
I went back and looked at some of your older threads about the last project because I remember feeling strongly at one point that you needed to dump it and I wanted to make sure I understood why I had that impression. The biggest red flag for me as an onlooker was that you seemed to associate the project directly with some of your real life hardships, things that you might have been grieving for at the time. In particular it seemed like you were writing the story not for yourself but for someone else, which is fine, except that your relationship with them turned painful.

I don't really know how much that might be the "why" you're looking for, and please forgive me if I'm way off base or overstepping, but that's the impression that had come across for me.

Not having the people that were going to read that story any more has definitely changed how I write. The only person I really *can* write for now is me, and *I’ve* changed as a person, which has made me confront some questions, such as: well, what *do* I really like to write?

For clarification: from 2016 to sometime late in 2018 I was wrapped up in a book I was writing about a girl pressed into becoming an assassin. That story *is* fraught in a lot of ways. It definitely represented a transition period for my writing style and my life pretty much entirely changed during the time I was writing that. Late in 2018 I decided to quit temporarily and go through some of my other ideas that I’d laid aside.

So then, I decided on one almost at random and was like why the hell not. I started writing regularly again and had finished a first draft of the new project within two and a half months.

That was a mixed experience, because it was an unusually coherent and good first draft, but I feel that it set the bar a little high. But it was an enormous accomplishment, because Id finally managed a stand-alone instead of merely the first installment in a planned series, I’d *finished* a *story.* I remember being kind of devastated upon finishing that (early this year) because I realized really suddenly that a lot of the people who had been important to me in my life, especially people who had been important to me as a writer, were gone now and that almost no one was really there to witness this achievement so I was kind of...celebrating it on my own, in silence. There was this English teacher who’d been really important to me, my high school best friend, who I’d always told about all my writing...and now they didn’t even know this thing I’d poured my heart and soul into existed. It was weird because I was *proud* of this book, and I’m rarely happy with things I write. I remember feeling like I’d advanced a lot. It was technically the fourth novel I’d finished, but I was definitely accomplishing something for the first time and I wasn’t sure if I was rejoicing or grieving.

Finished that book in February of 2019. Then I wanted to start something else and I tried to start on a new project immediately, but it failed to stick. So I floundered for a while and then decided to start on The Wolves in Our Walls, the project that I ended up failing to bond with at all and quitting after 50k words. I probably just didn’t think deeply about whether I really liked or cared about that idea and just wanted to be writing something again. It’s not really the kind of book I like, or that I would like to read, but I just figured maybe eventually it would grow on me.

It may be more that just my writing in general has a hell of a lot of emotional baggage. I never really got release for all the emotions that came of finishing my fourth book. I got a couple people to read it, but mentally I was still deeply mired in all the people who I thought would be next to me when I finally made that accomplishment.
 
Yes.

I have had a solid writing habit for seven years. I don't write much during the summer. I wrote two novellas in one summer and that was two years ago. This is the time that I take to recharge and enjoy spending time with my family.

The rest of the year, I write enough to satisfy the hours for a part time job. But I need the 2-3 months off in the summer. I can't function without it.

Maybe something similar to this is happening to you (a pattern you're not yet aware of). As a human, you are constantly evolving. Your creative mind is expanding and figuring out more efficient ways to work. There is a pattern natural to you that you are probably still understanding.

(sorry about the DP)

I’m still working out the habit part. I was able to finish my last complete novel ungodly fast. It was satisfying to see the progress, but I’m worrying that the act of tracking my progress is starting to drag me down. I’ve gotten a lot of benefit from writing daily. It’s helped me break through problems faster and make progress. But the “habit” has also crowded out brainstorming and taking time to puzzle things out. The “progress” measured in wordcount belies progress made through just messing around and writing long exploratory rambles in my notebook.

The difficulty of Taking a Break has reared its ugly head in an unexpected way, though: I developed a habit of writing every night right before bed. That’s by far the best time for writing I’ve discovered. Unfortunately it’s so well integrated into my bedtime routine that after finishing or quitting the last two projects I have been tossing and turning until 4am for days because my brain doesn’t register that it’s Bedtime until after I’ve done the writing for the day. Also forgetting my meds. It’s a mess, and it’s made me impatient to have something new to work on.
 
If you're getting no pleasure and enjoyment from it then why do it?

Allow yourself to quit. Take a break. You'll either take it up again later or you'll find a new hobby that you enjoy. I think all writers have to force themselves sometimes but it shouldn't be a daily/monthly slog to write anything. Maybe you've just moved on from this hobby or maybe you're just burnt out and need a break, maybe you haven't found an idea that you are really passionate about you just need to get it down. Like I said, maybe just stop. You may come back to writing but if you don't that's ok, life is too short to be forcing yourself to do something you're not enjoying. You're scared of getting burnt out but it sound to me as if you all ready are.

You're not alone with this feeling. I always take a break for a few months and come back feeling 100% better, but before you take a break ensure you write everything down so you don't forget it.

The likelihood of me quitting writing permanently is near zero, but I think there is merit in quitting projects you don’t like at all. Writing advice is generally pretty adamant about how you need to force yourself through, but that depends on actually believing that there is something good and worthwhile coming of it.

I’m honestly not sure I’ll come back to that particular story and it’s fine, maybe it’s not my kind of thing.
 

Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
Okay, so that was a different project? I hadn't realized.

It sounds like you have enough experience under your belt that this could just have been a fluke. Sometimes the story just doesn't work out once it hits the page.

You have a series of these posts, which is fine of course, that's what we're here for. But do you feel the emotions build up until you need to vent and release, or do you slog through these more intense emotions steadily? I think an answer would help us in knowing how to respond.
 

Chessie2

Staff
Article Team
The likelihood of me quitting writing permanently is near zero, but I think there is merit in quitting projects you don’t like at all. Writing advice is generally pretty adamant about how you need to force yourself through, but that depends on actually believing that there is something good and worthwhile coming of it.

I’m honestly not sure I’ll come back to that particular story and it’s fine, maybe it’s not my kind of thing.
My werewolf story was also a bust. Some of us just don't have it in us.
 
The amount of ideas I've walked away from. I just could never stick to one idea, doing multiple projects wasn't an option for me because I had limited time with college, work and being a carer for my father...I would get this passion for an idea, then half way through it would fizzle out and it made me feel like crap because I never completed anything. So I stuck to shorter stuff to begin with. It's all writing, right? Then I got this idea that I've stuck with for two years, and I can't imagine writing anything else. Maybe you just need to not be so hard on yourself and let the right idea come to you.
 

WooHooMan

Auror
Trust me, it’s the same for me too. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes I hate it. I think that’s normal. It’s not feeling *anything* that to me seems like the omen of something bad. That’s why I quit that last project.
Does it matter at all how you feel or don’t feel when writing?
I think you should just be concerned for the quality of the end product.
 
Does it matter at all how you feel or don’t feel when writing?
I think you should just be concerned for the quality of the end product.

I don’t know why anyone would write if they genuinely hated every part of the process. Even if you don’t exactly like the act of putting words down, you should *at least* enjoy the thought of having a finished product or just thinking about your story and world. It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone approaches writing from a standpoint of pure pragmatism. There’s a delight in making a sentence that is beautiful or just excellent in function. There’s fun in world-building and coming up with names for characters. Some of it is boring, frustrating, and initially unrewarding, but about the only reason to write is that you want to imo. There are easier jobs that make more money.

With that project, I just...did not care. At all.

But my answer to that is actually yes, it does. If I genuinely just don’t care about the story, I think it’s at least worth examining whether a reader would care. And also not caring about the work will affect the quality.
 
Okay, so that was a different project? I hadn't realized.

It sounds like you have enough experience under your belt that this could just have been a fluke. Sometimes the story just doesn't work out once it hits the page.

You have a series of these posts, which is fine of course, that's what we're here for. But do you feel the emotions build up until you need to vent and release, or do you slog through these more intense emotions steadily? I think an answer would help us in knowing how to respond.

I guess it just helps to talk about them/discuss them/answer questions, and so on. I have difficulty objectively seeing the problem if I’m unable to articulate it. Or maybe there isn’t a discrete problem. In that case it’s nice to know that I’m not completely alone in...whatever it is that’s happening.

I still have a lot of doubts about my ability to write. For a very long time I couldn’t finish anything, or at least very seldom finished anything. I feel like every project I have to lay aside or let go is “proving” that I don’t really have it in me. (Note that this is still happening after I’ve finished four novels.)

Sometimes running into hurdles can make me panic. I don’t really know why. At this point most of my identity is bound up in being a writer, so I guess it’s scary to not be immersed in it even for a second. Or most of my ability to do Worthwhile Things is. Or something.
 
The amount of ideas I've walked away from. I just could never stick to one idea, doing multiple projects wasn't an option for me because I had limited time with college, work and being a carer for my father...I would get this passion for an idea, then half way through it would fizzle out and it made me feel like crap because I never completed anything. So I stuck to shorter stuff to begin with. It's all writing, right? Then I got this idea that I've stuck with for two years, and I can't imagine writing anything else. Maybe you just need to not be so hard on yourself and let the right idea come to you.

This basically describes my life. I’ve found that if I give them a while to sort themselves out and note which ones seem more persistent, it can kind of sift out the chaff. Then just jump on one of those promising ones and give complete attention to that one idea as much as possible.

But on another note I used to have a Big Consuming Idea like that, but it came to me when I was like 14, when I didn’t have the technical ability to plot something that big and had pretty limited reading experience and being-alive experience. When I was 16 I finally laid it aside for later and started writing other things. I sometimes mess with my extensive worldbuilding, but that’s about it. I still like the basics of the idea and can see it becoming something cool, but also, a lot of my ideas for it have worked their way into other projects and it’s looking a little tattered due to that.
 
But on another note I used to have a Big Consuming Idea like that, but it came to me when I was like 14, when I didn’t have the technical ability to plot something that big and had pretty limited reading experience and being-alive experience.

This rang true for me. But the character I wanted to write was experiencing things that I never had so I couldn't 'feel' my way through it, I just couldn't make it feel/sound right. Ten years later I have experienced those things and writing it is now simples! Some much of writing is about drawing on life experience.
 

Ned Marcus

Maester
Perhaps you were just writing the wrong story. I'm not sure that everyone can write every type of story. I've had a dead feeling when writing some short stories, and despite a lot of work, I had to just stop. The same with some of my early novels.
 

Miles Lacey

Archmage
Sometimes you just have to walk away from the writing. If you no longer get any satisfaction from the writing or it seems as if you are bashing your head against the wall with the story you're trying to write about walk away. There's no shame in it.

Sometimes the story really does suck, the characters just don't come to life the way you want them to or the great idea you had proved to be too difficult to work with.

It's okay to turn off the computer, delete the half completed manuscript and go do something else.
 
I keep meditating on why I'm stuck and trying to figure it out and there are way too many possible reasons but honestly I don't know what *kinds* of things I *want* to write anymore and that's probably a lot to do with it. Or all of it.

Not that my interests have really...fundamentally...changed? But something has. I don't know if the catalyst is the reading I've done, the writing I've done, or just my continued existence in the world.

A lot of the old ideas and concepts i've been hanging onto forever actually do not interest me anymore, like, at all. So much so that I don't really know what does. I don't really even know what I like to read because I've been reading a lot and I like a lot of it but none of it is Everything I Could Possibly Want and in fact on the whole it's pretty far from that but I have no idea what that is. What a book that really was everything I could possibly want would even contain or look like.

For example, i've been reading and thoroughly enjoying the Gentleman Bastard novels, but as much as I like them they're very different from the kind of things I think I want to write. I feel like when I was younger I would read novels and I would pick out everything I liked and be like "my books are going to be like this and this and this because I admire this or I really like the way the author did this." Now it's like I don't know how to clearly identify those things. Or something. Or else I've developed a whole new category of books that's "I love reading this, but I would hate writing it." I don't know how to process that. It used to be that when I read something I liked I would invariably feel I wanted to write something like it. I think it's a little different now.
 
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Malik

Auror
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