Geez. Now I remember why I quit writing!

It's work. Hard work. :lol


I need a coffee break.

Next time someone tells you "get a real job" ask them to go write a novel then go to hell.

:eek

Writing can be your escape from work....

Next time someone tells you "get a real job" ask them to go write a novel then go to hell.

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:rollin

Tell them that the writing of that novel will also include editing, drafts, queries, a synopsis, and submission market research too, they're not getting off that easy...

I don't know. I've written quite a few novels, and hundreds of short stories, articles and poems. It's work, I suppose, but I have to stifle a laugh everytime I think of it as such.

I've also shoveled coal, worked as a lumberjack, and in a sawmill baled hay, dug ditchies, and waded in streams at temps well below zero.

Writing well generally isn't easy, though sometimes it is, but at its hardest, I have real problems thinking of writing as work.

Now I need a drink! :lol

Aren't there different kinds of difficulty? If we mean physical exhaustion, writing isn't "hard" in the way that shoveling coal and baling hay are. But, on the other hand, the purely physical tasks don't engage more than a fraction of your brain and don't lead to worry or doubt that what you have done is worthless, the way writing can. And at least when you have baled a bale or loaded sixteen tons of Number Nine Coal (whatever that is), or dug a nice neat ditch, you know you have accomplished something positive. When you felled a great tree, you knew you were a lumberjack and you're OK after sleeping all night and working all day. Etc. But when you have written a chapter or a stanza it may be rubbish, or you may have to tear it up and do it again as your work progresses.

Good writing, at least, is certainly work, IMHO, and often very unrewarding in any sense.

It would be sad if writing itself was unrewarding.

I don't feel that way with my writing. If I manage to write a chapter or two in one day, I am happy about it (but maybe that has more to do with my frenetic schedule than with the accomplishment itself). I don't know; maybe it's just different with me. I DO know that, when it comes to fiction writing, it is definitely physically exhausting, because during that session I'm in a whole 'nother world AND I have to accurately write about it. I have to live in other people. That is indeed work.

I think if it was unrewarding, a person wouldn't stay a writer for very long. JMHO.

I DO know that, when it comes to fiction writing, it is definitely physically exhausting

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Know what? That's absolutely TRUE!