If you want people to take your hobby seriously, treat it like a job. And then, you can hate it.

While I love to schedule activities, set goals, make long lists of accomplishments no matter how small, the one thing I’ve learned about myself is that if I schedule anything, I’ve now made it work. Even if it’s going to dinner with friends. Suddenly, I have a task to accomplish, a timetable to follow, and now the fun thing has become stressful.

And yet, somehow, I thought that this wouldn’t become a problem with writing.

Since I was in about fourth-grade—and even earlier, if my records from elementary school are any indicator—I’ve wanted to be a writer. I believe the whole time, I always thought of that writer as a novelist, I think simply because that was what I read at the time. The genre I wished to write changed over time, or rather, the target audience, until I ultimately landed in the realm of young adult. Though flexible with the idea of that changing too, as my interests evolve.

This meant I always had a go-to answer to the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” “Author” was always my answer. Usually, this was met with a response of “remember us when you’re famous someday,” which only goes to show how little the average person understands about the career. At least I knew better, even as a kid. I even planned on taking on a full-time job to help support my desire to be writing. But the response was cute. Nice. I didn’t mind it.

The alternative response was…yeah, worse. Once upon a time, I made the mistake of mentioning I had changed my major while I was in college. Now, I was going to college in order to pursue an education that would allow me to get a full-time job that supported my writing. I spent some time trying to further my writing skills at well, but that wasn’t really the point of my going to college. Of course, when I made the comment that I had changed my major to Computer Information Systems, which I ultimately graduated with, I had a family member say: “Good. I never wanted to say anything, but you never would have made any money as a writer.”

Well then.

Never mind the fact that this family member had never read so much as a word of my writing at this point. Never mind the fact that this was probably a silly, offhand comment. At the end of the day, this stung. I knew I was a writer. Knew that writers often don’t make a livable income. That’s why I was planning on getting a day job for crying out loud! But none of these factors matter when the right words dig in through your skull and make a home in your head.

Years later, it was sentiments like this that drove me to think about writing as more of a career, more like a day job, even as I already held one down. I took a look at my writing life and recognized that most of the time I spent focussing on my writing was over the weekend in a coffee shop, or on my vacation days. I worried that maybe this wasn’t enough, if I wanted novelist as a career.

This was how I made the decision to set a writing goal of working on my writing for at least 500 total hours in the year 2019.

I’ve written about this a bit in the past in an entirely different context. Written about I connect productivity with self-worth (which I shouldn’t) and how I run my life with checklists (and how that’s not always the best idea). And honestly, all of this comes back to writing. Everything in my life tends to because I’ve spent most of my life wanting to be a novelist. But there are some ideas about creativity that I’ve only arrived at recently.

Before I get too far ahead of myself and tell the story how this goal ended, let me go back and explain how I arrived at this arbitrary goal in the first place.

I started querying my first novel in September of 2018. The idea of the novel had actually originated back in 2007/2008-ish and gone through a number of iterations before reaching this point. In fact, though I worked on other novel ideas during this basically-10-year period, this work felt like the one that defined me. I was this story; this story was me. Which didn’t make it easy to throw into the query trenches. The rejections weren’t unexpected, but that didn’t make them less disheartening. It’s just the hard truth of being a writer.

By December of that year, however, it had started to beat up my self-worth. Remember how in the past I equated my productivity with self-worth? Yeah, this is an excellent example of how bad of an idea that is. I felt like less of a writer, because I wasn’t finding success. Even though I hadn’t expected to find anything remotely immediate! However, while you can know something is true, it can still feel false. Which is why, in December of 2018, I couldn’t help but feel like I might not be able to call myself a writer.

Again, I cannot state enough how WRONG of an idea this was. And I did realize that, even at the time. But when negative voices spring up in your head, they are a challenge to quiet, no matter how loud truth screams.

I started thinking of ways I could legitimize myself as a writer, make it clear that I approached it with all the intention of a career. Which is how I reached the idea of writing just 10 hours a week. Just 10 hours, I thought. Nothing compared to the 40 hours a week I worked at my day job. What was a quarter of that?

Boy howdy, let me tell you.

I thought this idea would allow me to write 10 hours a week, then shut off the guilt valve so I wouldn’t always feel ashamed when I was’t constantly working on writing. But this 10 hours a week goal meant I was always working on writing. I didn’t want to work on writing if I wasn’t tracking the time I spent, completely missing the fact that my best ideas often came out of spiraling thoughts that started off unrelated to writing. Which meant the only time I was working on writing was when I was focussing on writing. But writing comes out of how we live, not how we write, so my creativity was sputtering and constantly exhausted.

I was constantly exhausted.

After I left my day job for the day, I would take up a spot at a coffee shop and write for an hour. Never mind if I had no idea where I was going with a story; I still had to work on it for an hour. This resulted me in forcing my way through plots in a bull-headed way. I wrote one story wrong over and over again until eventually I had to shelve the work. On top of that, I was stressed when I made plans with friends and family. Where would I get my writing time in if I came home tired?

I don’t think it was entirely a coincidence that 2019 was also the year I was diagnosed with anxiety.

In 2020, I still didn’t get it. After writing 500 hours in 2019, I upped the goal in 2020. Then…well…2020 happened. My mind was occupied with other things. I thought I was just easing up for a few weeks and then…a couple years passed in the same state. Like many others, so much time spent isolated offered me a lot of time to think. Which made me realize:

Wow, am I not writing the right way for me.

Like I said, I work best in stops and starts, in spiraling ideas that somehow solve plot problems. In wondering and wandering. Not an hour with my butt in a chair. Writing is so much more than writing. And by making it only about writing, it made me stop wanting to be a writer at all. At least a little bit.

But I love writing. It’s how I explain myself to myself. It’s how I make sense of the world and the swirling chaos inside of me. And when I stepped back from the rigidity of my plan, I started learning that love again.

See, the thing is, creative endeavors are not like normal careers. In some ways, they’re easier. After all, you get to do the thing you love. You get to live in your head more than a normal person, express those feelings, and if you’re lucky, get paid for it. In some ways, they’re harder. Your self-worth ends up wrapped up in your output and when your product is criticized, you yourself feel diminished.

To a certain extent, I think this path of mine to treat writing like a job—because I hope it to be one of mine that I get paid for someday—was born out of nothing more than fear. Fear that I would be diminished. Fear that I would be told that writing wasn’t my job. Fear that I would be nothing more than a little girl playing make-believe afraid to grow up and face the big, bad real world. All because I was worried about how I would be perceived.

The hardest part to remember is that sometimes, the way people perceive you doesn’t matter, not when they are reaching that conclusion through irrelevant facts. You don’t have to write everyday to be a writer. You don’t have to write every week to be a writer. I kept looking for a qualifier so that no one could tell me I wasn’t a writer. But that qualifier doesn’t exist, and I’ll likely always be facing such negativity from some direction.

Writing is my hobby. It is also my job. Maybe not one I get paid for, but one I feel responsible for. No matter what anyone else says, no one can take that away from me. I need to listen to myself, what I need to do, to accomplish my goals, not the ideas of someone else who has never dared dream that big.

So trust yourself. It will always be a challenge, always be a battle, but trust that the path you’re taking is the right one if it feels like the right one. It won’t be without hardship or naysayers, but at the end of the day, the only one you owe any explanation to is yourself.