Say no to martyr artists

Writers love metaphors.

Writers also love writing about stuff – go figure.

That means writers have written a lot about the act of writing.

It also means they’ve shared a lot of metaphors about it. The phrase “Writing is like…” has hundreds of endings written down, some from the greatest writers in history.

I studied these metaphors – what folks think writing is like.

It was… an experience.

One of the more famous, gruesome and unhelpful metaphors around is that writing is like slitting your wrists and bleeding all over the page.

When someone tells me writing leaves them feeling drained, this metaphor comes to mind.

I also think about how much I can help them.

Writing doesn’t have to be bloody. It doesn’t have to be messy, painful, exhausting, tedious or damaging to your health.

Plenty of artists – writers or otherwise – will disagree there. They say that suffering fuels their art, that it’s their duty as a creative person to torture themselves with the creative process.

Yikes.

Yeah, pain can make good fodder for great art. The trick is to experience that before you create, not during the process.

If you enjoy the creative process, you can better translate your suffering into art. It’ll be more therapeutic too.

I don’t know – I’ve never had much patience for martyr artists. If creation is agony, then you’re doing it wrong.

This applies to people who don’t consider themselves artists. If you’re writing, say, technical documentation, (which is still a creative process, but whatever,) you don’t need to suffer with that.

You can enjoy the creative process. After all, creativity is deeply satisfying, nurturing and fun. If Minecraft is the best-selling video game in history, then I must be right.

You can enjoy the writing process. For me, writing is partly creative and partly technical. It’s productive and useful. It’s therapy, fun, a challenge and an easy way into the flow state.

These weren’t always the case, though. I had to learn each of those. After all, they’re all skills – even enjoying writing is something you can learn.

It takes more than practice – it takes trying the right ideas, experimenting with some stuff and making it all your own.

Random practice leads to random outcomes. What do you need to focus on to learn to enjoy the writing process?

Whatever your answers are – or even if you don’t know the answers – just know it’s possible to learn this. You already know how to enjoy, so learning to enjoy writing is quicker and easier than you think.

Once you know how.

My 17th book is called I Wrote This on a Monday.

It’s the title and it’s also an accurate description. How would you like to be able to write whole books in a single day? If you could write tens of thousands of words and enjoy it, what would that be worth to you?

In this book, I break down my approach to writing. It’s practical and unique advice that you can immediately apply and see results.

Use it all and you’ll become a writing machine.

You’ve never read anything like this before:

https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B09XL6KGVB