For most of December and January, I worked on finishing my novel. I’d been working on it for a long time before that (years), but at a slow, comfortable pace. For most of that time, I was a casual writer.
It seems odd to think that, but it’s true. I wrote on weekends (sometimes). I failed, most of the time, at writing in the mornings before work. I picked up books on writing, flipped through the first few chapters, and never took what they said to heart. But I was a writer, right?
Despite how much or little writing I got done during that long casual period, the most significant difference was how I felt during that time. Most of the time I was content with not writing. I knew that I could be doing more but the words weren’t there and I didn’t want to do much to get them. In contrast, over the past few months, I was consumed with the novel, its characters, the world I’d created. It haunted my dreams, filled my mind during meetings and conversations. I wrote voraciously. Though only separated by a few days, the two time periods were worlds apart. It was the last one that allowed me to finish, not the first.
None of this is to say that there’s anything wrong with the casual writer. I think it’s important that we all go through those phases; at least for me, it is a reminder of how I don’t want to be. Low points are necessary, if you want to have high points. They prevent burnout. They allow time for other things. They’re okay, as long as you return back to being the real writer, at some point. As long as you recognize that as a writer you can’t actually get by with just writing when you feel like it or just before a workshop. There’s work in being a writer.