If you read quotes and memes about writing, you get the clear idea that being a writer is horrible. I've seen quotes from famous, long-dead authors about how we only write because we must, because we're too tormented by the stories in our heads, but that's it's a lonely, miserable existence. I recently had a friend tag me in a meme that said something like, "Writing is like riding a bicycle, except that the bicycle is on fire, and I'm on fire, and I'm in Hell." She asked me if that's how I felt about writing.
So is it? OMG, no! That's a bunch of pretentious crap.
I love writing. It's fun and exciting and mentally challenging. It pulls things out of me I had no idea were there. I get to paint pictures with words. I encounter problems and get to solve them. I get to lose myself in a story even more than when I read. It's amazing and it feels decadent to spend my time that way. I love writing so much that my career has entailed writing news and information for TV, radio, newspaper, magazine, and the Internet. And when I'm not writing for work, I'm writing fiction and screenplays.
That's not to say it's easy. Writing is hard work. We spend months or years writing and revising and crafting something we love, only to face rejection from agents and publishers and criticism from readers. Few authors make enough money from their books to quit their days jobs. And yet, we keep writing.
Why? Because we're tortured by characters wanting out of our minds? Because we're masochists or crazy people? No. Well, maybe we're a little crazy. But we write because we love writing. Because we love the written word. Because when you get a story in your head you want to write it and see how it comes out, and then see if it moves other people the way it moved you.
I have a lot of friends who are writers, and all of them write because they enjoy it. Most of them have day jobs and families and responsibilities and struggle to make time to write. We all face frustrations and self-doubt and rejection and some days we want to give up -- but then the lure of the story pulls us back in and we love it all over again.
So no, writing isn't like riding a burning bike through hell. It's living in your imagination and making impossible things come to life. It's allowing your mind to plot a new course and then showing other people the way. To borrow a line from Willy Wonka, "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
If you're doing something that IS like riding a burning bike through Hell, by all means STOP IT! That's what I'd do. And then I'd write about it.