It's true!
It's not something I talk about often unless I'm dunking on the American college system or myself but I have a Bachelor's in creative writing with a screenplay focus. That's about the extent I usually talk about this. I feel like writing something that doesn't have hours upon hours of lore or revisions attached to it, so let's dive in.
My college story is long. To paraphrase: my parents paid for most of my college tuition, starting with a semester of music education immediately after high school. Followed by that was a semester as a journalism major but might as well have been undecided because I just knocked out general education courses that semester. I dropped out and got a certification in audio engineering, looked for work, and tried to figure out what I wanted to fucking do for a few years, then decided to go to a community college for software engineering. I had an actual fucking breakdown and dropped out then decided to go for creative writing after moving out of my parents' place (finally -- there's nothing wrong with living with your parents, I just had a consistently toxic relationship with mine).
I found that I really liked writing. The process of it was relatively soothing to me and I liked that I could do it fucking anywhere. I wanted a degree in something and finally found something I could tolerate at the worst. The schooling was mostly not great with some cool moments. I met a lot of cool instructors and read the work of some students with some really cool ideas. I liked some of the challenges. However, I thought most of them were overkill. I finished all of my requirements and got my degree anyway.
As with the vast majority of my school experience, I tried to avoid anything extracurricular. In a college of other writing students, I didn't think I would really connect with any of them on anything other than a superficial "let's network" capacity. The ones I did find particularly intriguing didn't seem to have any interest in me. There were avenues for us to get to know each other despite all of my classes being online. I just didn't want to "force myself onto others". This is my problem with almost every goddamn thing I do. Wait, that's not the topic of this blog post. How did this paragraph even start? Ah! Got it. One day, I did do something extracurricular.
The school as a whole and certain programs would hold their own live chat things where we all watch some sort of talk or seminar. Many of the ones I wanted to try out, I would end up getting distracted by something else, decide I was too depressed to pay attention, they were scheduled on days I had to go to my terrible job, or some other such reason. One I finally made it to. I don't remember what the initial point of this thing was supposed to be but it consisted of a person or two that worked for the creative writing program and a published author.
Maybe I misinterpreted something but the guest author really had an air of just "well, just do things, duh." The topics thrown at him were usually "how specifically might new writers do this?" or "how do you pump out certain works that fast?" or "how often do you revise your stuff?" Most of his responses were basically "writers write; you just have to start getting into the habit of writing for at least 4 hours a day. If you can't do that, what's stopping you? Like, what are you even doing?" He proceeded to say "I write like that all the time, sometimes more, and I still have time to watch four hours of TV every night. So if you're not doing that then what are you even doing? What's stopping you?"
I did not respond in the text chat, though I could have. The whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth. Now writing *something* every single day is not necessarily bad advice. The message I felt was implied though was very competitive, which is sadder than anything else coming from a published author who has actually made some income from his intellectual property punching down to a bunch of 20-somethings gambling with their careers or single moms trying to take life by the balls. I think he even unironically talked about how the whole thing was a competition. The one or two people in the video chat we were all watching did not necessarily refute this nor completely disagree with the guest speaker. I won't get into one of the only other ones of these things I ever attended where there were about six writers and every time the woman would try to make an interesting point, the men would field questions she was already addressing. "Why even bring up this experience in your life?" is probably a better avenue for us to stroll down here.
I don't make the fucking money to write 4 hours a day. I spend many days out of the house at someplace I don't want to be so I can make money ***to*** write. Mostly writing things that, released fully or not, will make me approximately $0. Now all of this was pre-COVID-19. Even if it weren't, it's still not a neurodivergent-friendly mentality to be spewing to people that are trying to learn what the hell to do with their passions. This is especially haphazard to students, many of which had kids to look after as well.
This "constantly push things out" mentality doesn't really help anyone. Because if you think the dude from the web seminar telling college students something along the lines of "it's all a competition and you're all competing with me so what's your excuse for not constantly writing" might be a bit of a silly willy, he became that silly willy with that mentality. Probably. That or some writer's drama villain origin plot point but in real life. There are things that could be gleaned from this that could be helpful while still keeping yourself healthy. Writing a little something every day is great practice. The saying "writers write" is as true as it is redundant. However, some people, like the published author and pro student competitor I've been dishing about this whole time, kind of make "writers write" imply that you aren't a writer if you aren't writing. This might sound ridiculous on its own or at least benign. For people already self-conscious about going into a field that can be notoriously unforgiving to your sense of rejection and impostor syndrome, that benign notion can lead to thoughts like "you are not a writer whatsoever unless you suffer and constantly diminish your own health". This is what irritates me and I think part of that is because it still affects me. It's one of those things where no matter how much I am aware of it, it doesn't make it go away. I can't imagine what this could mean for people who are worse about these sort of mental habits than I am or have dreamed about writing and only writing for a long time.
Of course, there's also the fact that not everybody can find a job in writing anything. Writing things you actually like and getting paid for it is a rarity. Writing your own heartfelt story and profiting from its publication is like seeing a shooting star during a tornado next to a volcano from the bottom of a well.
I guess what I'm saying is that getting into a routine is good and all but it isn't going to be good for you your entire life. There's a rule of thumb with singing practicing and warming up. If you feel any sort of pain (that you aren't obviously forcing out yourself), just stop. Pick it up later or the next day. I feel the same with writing. Sometimes "later" is a week later. The thing is if you really love doing what you're doing or writing what you're writing, why would you just magically not want to do that anymore? Taking time to figure out what's up with that is important too. Otherwise, you're writing what you're writing to convince an imaginary college speaker that you're valid. It isn't servicing the story or your passion. Sometimes, when this happens to me, I just switch to writing something else. Sometimes, my brain just doesn't work so I play Hades for like six hours instead of working on things I "should" be working on.
I guess that's it for this blog post. Uhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh! (Thanks for reading, don't spread a fucking disease)
