For the book readers that also aspire to be published writers. Maybe you've already started writing but struggle with consistency. Or maybe you have ideas or notes but haven't started writing yet. How have your reading goals affected your ability or time management to write? For example…
I have notes upon notes of different story ideas, character development, world building, plot points, etc… But I spend most of my free time reading. Last year I read 173 books. This year I initially set a goal of 175 books. But I stopped to think about why I don't write when I keep saying I want to write.
The obvious answer for me was Fear. I allowed that fear to put me in a state of complacent laziness. My word of the year is "losing." Losing the things that are holding me back, like fear. The lazy boils down to having too many books on my TBR & wanting to devote as much time to reading as I can. But oh, imagine the feeling of accomplishment to write, finish, and publish my own books! So, I dropped my TBR goal by 55 books, from 175 to 120. I will devote that time gained to the process of writing. If needed, I will drop my TBR goal even further. I don't plan to not read, but rather to balance my reading time to accomplish other goals.
If you changed your reading goal for the year already, what did you change and why? If you are a reader who also wants to write, but haven't started yet, what is your why?
by SierraSugar
9 Comments
Laziness.
173 books last year is wild, no wonder you don’t have time to write lol
But seriously dropping your goal to make space for writing is smart – I’ve been telling myself “I’ll write after I finish this series” for like 3 years now and there’s always another series
No patience for the part where writing is ugly and sucks.
Plus, the “people hate their own art” thing. Anything I write just sounds like I wrote it. Things other people write sound so natural.
I think I am a good writer (on a sentence level) but there’s so much more to actually hauling a piece of work into shape from an idea. A lot of it is just patience, hyperfocus and pushing down a ton of doubt.
Perhaps because reading is one skill, writing is another. Not the actual putting words on the page, but the back end of the business. The marketing, the process of publishing. It’s a lot of work.
Honestly I put all of my writing ideas in to a DnD campaign for an audience of 5 close friends and that’s been enough to get the story out of my head and in to other minds – which kinda saps away the motivation to write it all out and publish 😛
I have ideas, but I do not really know where to start.
Writers always advise to “just start writing” or whatever else, but it’s hard to put even a few words down when you don’t have an idea of the path you want to take for your story. It’s overwhelming, to have all these thoughts in your brain and not knowing how to put them to use in a way that makes sense. And it’s scary to envision all of the work you will have to put into your first draft and right to the final product, without even knowing if it will be all for nothing. And if that wasn’t enough, you also have the pressure of being as good as other authors on the get-go, even if you logically know they all started somewhere and weren’t necessarily amazing writers on the first try in the past.
All in all.. it’s just hard to find the courage to do it.
And yeah, with how much time I spend reading, it feels pointless to even try writing myself. Like, there are so many amazing authors out there.. so why even bother, you know ?
I don’t have the time mostly
I do a lot of world building while musing to myself at work but I don’t have time to put a lot of it down anywhere
I was outlining and realised that one of the characters needed more time to get to the point where I needed them to be, but I also wasn’t sure how to give them that time adding extra chapters from their point of view. I thought I’d give myself time to think it over and pick it up again when I had an idea, but I’ve ended up spending that time prepping my D&D sessions instead.
My laptop died the final death and I can’t afford to replace it yet. I’ve written in notebooks before, but transcribing to a submittal version sucked the big one. I tried various phone apps for writing, but then I have to deal with my phones auto correct as well as the clunkiness of features designed for a PC not a phone.