{"id":165,"date":"2017-01-05T20:42:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-05T20:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/?p=165"},"modified":"2018-11-20T05:44:46","modified_gmt":"2018-11-20T05:44:46","slug":"why-i-write-finding-joy-in-new-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/?p=165","title":{"rendered":"Why I Write: Finding Joy in the New Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following was also cross-posted on my personal blog, Aquafortis<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

\n<\/a><\/div>\n

We’ve
\n been talking about writing goals in our WritingYA critique group this
\nmonth, and I’ve been thinking a lot about that over the past few weeks.
\nOne of the ideas I keep coming back to is reconnecting with what brings
\nme joy in writing.<\/p>\n

It’s a tough question, and one I
\nfind particularly difficult to consider during times when ongoing
\nanxiety and depression issues rear their ugly Cerberus-like heads and
\ndistract me from seeing an answer. In part, I think I keep obsessing
\nover this particular question BECAUSE it has been so hard to answer. The
\n easy, pat response is, of course, that the writing itself, the act of
\ncrafting words and bringing stories to life is a joy in itself. That’s
\nwhat everyone wants to hear, right?<\/p>\n

There’s more to it.
\n It isn’t solely about the joy of putting words to page. That particular
\n joy is something I’ve felt ever since I was a child, but here’s an
\nadmission: it was not sufficient to tip me over the edge into wanting to
\n make writing my life’s work.<\/p>\n

If you know me IRL or
\nhave been reading my blog and other social media for a while, you’ll
\nknow that I was focused on a visual art career from about middle school
\nonward. If anything has ever been a calling<\/i> for me, that felt like it. I liked writing, but art owned my soul.<\/p>\n

It
\n turns out that maybe woo-woo soul searching questions\u2014am I still an
\nartist? Is writing my new calling? Can they both be my calling?\u2014are sly
\ndistractions from the question of what brings me joy in writing. And
\nonce I’ve been distracted by those questions, I end up sliding down a
\nrabbit hole of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear.<\/p>\n

But, as I
\n started really focusing on the idea of what brings me joy in writing,
\nit was much more concrete and real-world than I expected. I looked back
\non what caused me to make that initial decision to try writing freelance
\n articles on the side for my then-employer<\/a>, which is what led me to take that first writing class through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program<\/a>. What was it that made me so happy, so elated, so motivated to write those arguably quite ridiculous pieces of writing?<\/p>\n

Besides
\n the fact that I got to visit weird websites and make jokes about them,
\ngot to humorously explicate pithy quotations, and got paid a teeny bonus
\n for doing so, this was my first experience of the sense of connection
\nthat writing for a public audience can create. Not just a SENSE of
\nconnection: an actual connection, because people would email me with
\nsuggestions; they’d send me comments. I was basically blogging before
\nthere were blogging platforms, because this was 1999-ish<\/a>.
\n I was lucky to have an insta-audience (albeit a small one) because I
\ntook over someone else’s columns on an already-established site, and it
\nwas an incredible feeling to get those responses to what I
\nwrote\u2014sometimes from the very websites I was writing about. (And I
\nlearned a lot about the fine line between jokes and gratuitous
\nhurtfulness, because I was a very sarcastic twentysomething.)<\/p>\n

This
\n is interesting, because I have mixed feelings about the IDEA of
\nconnection\u2014my social anxiety and introversion comes into play more and
\nmore the harder I think about it. I start thinking about all the
\nblogging and writing I’ve done that does NOT make me feel like I’ve
\nmanaged to connect. And the stakes feel higher, too, because I’ve
\naccepted the decision to make writing a major part of my career, not
\njust something I’m doing on the side. <\/p>\n

So then I get
\nlost in the thought-hole of “I’m doing this for my job, so I can’t
\nafford to think about FUN anymore.” The very idea of joy seems
\nirrelevant. This is the mire I get caught in, over and over.
\nWhere
\n that train of thought has gone off the rails, I believe, is that I’ve
\ncreated a false dichotomy between work ENJOYMENT and work EFFECTIVENESS.
\n The truth is that I’m NOT as effective a writer when I am not in touch
\nwith my reasons for doing it. When I’m distracted by extraneous worries
\nthat fool me into thinking they are the real problem.<\/p>\n

And
\n so that brings me back to what my intrinsic rewards are, and besides
\nsatisfaction in a piece I enjoyed writing and worked hard on, and
\nlaughing at my own jokes, I keep coming back to writing as an act of
\nconnection. Some corollary truths here: When I am more fully engaged in a
\n piece, I think it is ultimately more effective in making me feel
\nconnected. I am engaged in this because I feel like I am talking to YOU,
\n right now. The writing itself makes me feel connected, if I engage in
\nit fully.<\/p>\n

That feeling has little to do with any
\ncomments or responses the writing might generate later, but I wonder: is
\n there a sense of disengagement in some of the posts I write that
\nactually somehow discourages connection and leads to fewer comments? By
\ndisengagement, I don’t mean a lack of honesty or an unwillingness to
\nspill my guts (though I am definitely guilty of the latter; I’m not a
\nperson who is forward with my opinions)\u2014rather, I wonder if I’m
\ninadvertently creating a feeling of distance. In my magazine writing
\ncourse, in graduate school, I was repeatedly pegged as sounding too
\nacademic, and I wonder if that plays into it.<\/p>\n

So I have been thinking of ways to connect, to engage. Different ways to approach my writing on a more day-to-day level.<\/p>\n

I’m still thinking. More on that later\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following was also cross-posted on my personal blog, Aquafortis. We’ve been talking about writing goals in our WritingYA critique group this month, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,15,10,52],"class_list":["post-165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-af","tag-random-notes-and-errata","tag-views","tag-writing-daze"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=165"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9186,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions\/9186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}