If you’re really working, trying, doing your best to spend about an hour every day, after work or school or whatever, to write… and you hold aspirations to be a “writer,” to maybe support yourself one day by your craft alone, does that make writing a hobby? Or is it something more? A passion? What differentiates a passion from a hobby? Is it going to bed every night, thinking of a story in which you’re knee-deep, doing your best to tell? Is it doing something until your fingers bleed, or it’s 3am and you didn’t even notice that your wife went to bed without you? I don’t know where I stand with any of that jazz. I enjoy writing, I love telling stories, I love to read stories, and when I sit down to write, I find myself astounded (and oftentimes frightened) by the process of unearthing them.
My job and school, though… they sap a lot of my energy from me. And writing, for me, has never been easy. I don’t care what I’m working on, it’s always work. And, sometimes, the last thing I need after 9 hours of work is more work. And so I go to other hobbies. The D&D campaign we’ve started recently with some friends, painting or playing with my Warhammer 40K miniatures, teaching myself Adobe Illustrator… these things are hobbies.
I’m not so sure writing is a hobby. I think maybe when hobbies consume your being, when, even while you’re not actively engaging in them, you’re thinking of them, then it’s a passion. My problem isn’t desire, because I have plenty of that. My issue, at the moment, is drive and commitment. And time. Talent is cheap, it’s been said by professionals. To paraphrase further, “The only difference between a talented writer and a successful one is a whole hell of a lot of hard damn work.”
If only I had more time in the day.
Hmm… that’d be a neat idea for a story…
Off to bed.
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