This is lovely! ^^ And so relatable until your twenties. I hope I will continue to go through similar progress!
Reading this made me think again how weird it is that it’s so hard for some people to conceptualize writing as a steady, on-going process instead of something like, you miraculously wake up one day with an urge to tell a story and write a best seller just like that, and it’s never hard again. (Sure, a lot of media has contributed to this fantasy but still…) If people understand that talented athletes still need to practice, they can’t just run a marathon without steady and hard work, it shouldn’t be that hard to understand it applies to everything, writing too.
Also, it really is interesting what you said about people perceiving writing as something you haven’t succeeded at yet! I just had a job interview this week, I had mentioned writing in my application, and the interviewer asked me what kind of book was I “thinking of writing”. People younger than me are published authors, but still most people assume I haven’t even written a book yet. I suppose a lot of people really do just talk about it without actually doing it.
I hope you get there before I did! It seemed like it took me a really long time to “get serious.” And I think very few people actually do know the way these things work and feel in the real world because writing is by nature such a solitary procedure and people only find out it happened when they discover the end product. You can even go as far as to say how many rejections J.K. Rowling had and they somehow won’t realize that almost everyone goes through a longish process and MOST of them never get past that bit (either they give up or they never get accepted no matter how long they try, and no one hears about that as an un-success story either). Maybe the whole idea that we’re always gonna do it someday is based on this feeling almost everyone has that they have a book in them, and most actually never get around to writing it. It’s always something they aspire to do one day.
Here’s to a hundred more.
This is lovely! ^^ And so relatable until your twenties. I hope I will continue to go through similar progress!
Reading this made me think again how weird it is that it’s so hard for some people to conceptualize writing as a steady, on-going process instead of something like, you miraculously wake up one day with an urge to tell a story and write a best seller just like that, and it’s never hard again. (Sure, a lot of media has contributed to this fantasy but still…) If people understand that talented athletes still need to practice, they can’t just run a marathon without steady and hard work, it shouldn’t be that hard to understand it applies to everything, writing too.
Also, it really is interesting what you said about people perceiving writing as something you haven’t succeeded at yet! I just had a job interview this week, I had mentioned writing in my application, and the interviewer asked me what kind of book was I “thinking of writing”. People younger than me are published authors, but still most people assume I haven’t even written a book yet. I suppose a lot of people really do just talk about it without actually doing it.
I hope you get there before I did! It seemed like it took me a really long time to “get serious.” And I think very few people actually do know the way these things work and feel in the real world because writing is by nature such a solitary procedure and people only find out it happened when they discover the end product. You can even go as far as to say how many rejections J.K. Rowling had and they somehow won’t realize that almost everyone goes through a longish process and MOST of them never get past that bit (either they give up or they never get accepted no matter how long they try, and no one hears about that as an un-success story either). Maybe the whole idea that we’re always gonna do it someday is based on this feeling almost everyone has that they have a book in them, and most actually never get around to writing it. It’s always something they aspire to do one day.