Valentine’s Day is tomorrow and this month is all about Loooove. Romantic love. (BTW thanks Elena, for the awesome pic.) I decided today to post about a different type of love. My love for what I’ve chosen to do with my life. We writers are truly blessed, besides the respect from family and friends (and don’t forget strangers who tell us we should write a book like Hunger Games), we can expect fortunes to fall into our laps after our first novel is complete.
What?! You mean this isn’t true?
So, I decided to realistically write down five reasons why I love being a writer (to hold me over until the money starts rolling in.)
1. Working with Bed Head: Seriously, you can wear whatever you want and look however you want. Unless you’re working at Starbucks. They’ve been known to ask people to go home and change out of their pyjamas.
2. Lying for a Living: It is really cool to make shit up. I love testing my lies, I mean stories, on family members and strangers. It’s fun to see people’s reactions when I tell them I have the power to read their minds.
3. Goofing Off is a Necessity: Watching TV and reading books are a necessary part of this life. If you can’t spend hours watching full seasons of True Blood, or see yourself spending Sunday reading your favourite books rather than cleaning the house, then I have to doubt your commitment to this career.
4. Ignoring Problems: When confronted with an obstacle in our stories, or writer’s block, or our characters have decided to have a party instead of going on the quest, we as writers are encouraged to ignore these problems. We are continually being advised to forget them, to go for a walk, and to take our minds off these things. How great is that? Can you imagine a doctor confronted with a medical issue during surgery? And his coworkers saying… Gee, Dr. Bob, why don’t you take a walk and forget about this? The answer will come to you later. The patient’s only bleeding internally, he’ll keep until you get back.
5. Others Who Hear Voices: One of the best things about being a writer is being able to hang out with other writers. We ‘get’ each other. We…Complete… Each other. Seriously, my real life writing friends are my rocks, my cheering section and my giggle buddies. (Yes, giggle buddy.) Who else can understand the craziness we have inside ourselves, but other crazy people?
And the bonus reason that I love being a writer?
6. Being Able to Write: Seriously, I love creating characters, stories and worlds. How cool is it that we can daydream and call it work? To be able to write our stories and share them with others? To have those people fall into our worlds and escape their mundane life? Way too cool for words actually.
This is a fantastic job and I hope you all love it as much as me. What’s the reason you love writing?
