Thanks for your comment! I’ll be sure to check out your blog!

Unless you’re extremely successful, the hourly rate for freelance writing is worse than almost any other work you care to do (I’m assuming that, as a writer, you’re bound to be articulate and have good intelligence). I know a few people who write for a living and they put in 50- or 60- hour weeks.

That’s why I’ve gone back to the day job and keep my writing as a hobby these days!

At least I wasn’t writing stuff I hated writing. I’m all through with that, at least for now. That’s one reason I don’t want to go into technical writing.

I admit, sometimes forcing through a block doesn’t work too well. Then again, I am BRILLIANT at revising. Even if the final draft you read of mine isn’t great, you should imagine how horrid it was the first time around, for I have undoubtedly done a great deal of work on it since the first time it came out. Maybe that’s why it’s important for me to write on, even if what comes out isn’t fantastic.

one of the drawbacks of school …writing has, somehow, become all work and no fun any more…except, occasionally, for my blogs.

I need to make time for MY writing.

Like Shakespeare, I tend to try to work through that feeling of burnout when it hits. It works better for me to also make a note of where I was at and go ahead with a short break, after which I make myself go back in fresh. It’s hard to take something you love and make a task of it; that’s gotten me on a couple of occasions.

However, like Stephanie, if I can’t make myself do it and know my work will suffer badly if I try, I just leave it alone for a while. Even in the writer’s block I was in, I managed a few poems and bits on the in-between times, with those times being months or even years apart.

Sometimes Inspiration only visits occasionally and you have to wrestle her when she shows up to get anything from her, while other times she comes bearing gifts and shows up often. You just go with her whims to some extent and go where she takes you. Once, when I was 14, I tranced out after an intense couple of hours and just wrote. When I came back into focus, feeling much calmer, I realized I’d just written about 6 poems that, to this day, are some of my most profound, if somewhat dark, work.

Wouldn’t the world be a boring place if we were all the same and the same stuff, the same processes, the same methods, the same foods, etc.etc.etc all worked the same for everyone?

No thanks! I LOVE diversity. It’s what makes you you, me me, and everyone else everyone else, individually speaking.

By the way, you should probably have been warned that I used this blog and my reponse to it to write my blog. Like a bonus Thursday thievery only on Wednesday.

On the other hand, most people simply don’t try. The feeling isn’t there, so they don’t even bring up the document at all. And thus they never know what might happen when they actually do push through the feeling. Yes, they might find the same results you have found, but they risk not realizing what they MIGHT do if they try a bit harder.

You know your results because you’ve tried them. Other writers may not yet know.

And we are different with the various projects as well. Yes, I have several projects to work on, but I have tremendous difficulty working on more than one in a given time period. I have to finish a project–at least a full rough draft–before I start something else.