In my last post, I wrote about the hardest thing about being a writer. About coming up with great ideas, crafting memorable characters, and expressing yourself in ways that will hold your readers captive from the first word right down to the last.
I ended up talking about believing in yourself. All of it sounded, well, pretty hard. Then why do I do it? Why do I spend hours plugging away at my keyboard from day to day? The answer is obvious: I like it. No, I love it. Have loved it from the first day my elementary teacher read my essay to the class. From that day, I decided I wanted to be a writer. Why?
To have my work read, of course. It’s no fun if you spend hours working at something and no one ever sees it.
So, yes, I wanted my work to be read. I wanted someone to tell me that my story, essay, poem touched them in some way. But more than that, I enjoy crafting stories that give me pleasure to read. If I can’t feel that I enjoyed developing my characters, that I want to meet them again and again, that I wonder how they are coping with whatever challenges they faced during their first adventure, if I don’t feel any of those things, then I think I may have failed.
In other words, if I can forget about them after I type The End, then I’d expect my readers to forget about them as well.
In addition to crafting memorable characters, I like the flexibility of being a writer. As any writer would tell you, we get to choose our hours, how much or how little we want to work, and even what we want to write about.
When I first began writing, I worked mostly on fiction — short stories, then novels. Later, I began writing health-related articles (I worked in the healthcare field) for a number of companies, and this helped supplement my income. But my joy remained writing fiction.
However, freelance writing opened me up to a whole new world of knowledge. I learned to research and present my facts with proper journalistic accuracy. Even in my novels, I aim to follow this principle. Which brings me to another point about what I like about being a writer.
Over the years, I have met a lot of kind and interesting people, in person and online. Some of these people are members of my critique group. They are some of the most wonderful people in the world. They not only assist me with the mechanics of writing, but also with the content. They will not let me get away with anything that’s incorrect, even though it’s fiction.
Finally, what I like about being a writer is being able to touch people’s lives. When a writer leaves a review that says the story touched her in a special way, I feel I’ve done my duty.
I like being a writer because it gives me the freedom to write what I want to write, when I want to write, and how I want to write it. I get to touch people’s lives by crafting plots and memorable characters they can relate to, and I’m helped in doing this by associating with other writers in a way that is beneficial to all of us.
