My Love/Hate Relationship With Writing

The way I see it, it’s like a movie.  A bad movie.  A romantic comedy where:

• Boy meets girl,
• Boy and girl are attracted to each other, but each fights the attraction,
• Wacky hijinks ensue and finally,
• Boy and girl fall in love, living happily ever after

In this scenario, I’m boy and girl is played by writing.  Yeah, I’m having a love affair with writing.  I’ve tried to fight it for years.  Why?  There is no logical explanation.  All I know is that I have found every excuse in the book to avoid writing.  Wacky hijinks (such as they are) have ensued, and now writing and I are on the threshold of getting together once and for all.

Elsewhere on this blog I have commented that there are really only three thing that I want to do with my life.  First, I want to write.  Second, I want to race sportscars.  And third, I want to work on accomplishing the goals on my Goddard List*.  That’s all, just those three things.  Yet, what do I spend my time doing?  One thing I do is run a business that I neither like nor gain any satisfaction from.  Second, I work on another Internet-based business that has yet to make a dime (it’s still in the start-up phase) and takes up much of my day.  I justify spending my time on these businesses because: 1) they pay the bills (at least one of them does), and 2) they provide me with the freedom to write, race, and work on my Goddard List.

* I promise to detail my Goddard List in an upcoming post.

For the past couple of years, I have been deluding myself.  Here’s the truth: My current business pays the bills and provides me with the freedom to pursue my goals.  The Internet start-up, while holding some promise, is taking up the time provided by my other business and is preventing me from writing.  To remedy that, I put the Internet business up for sale this week.  I’ve gotten the business to the point where it can now start making some money.  However, it is going to take time and effort, two things I want to devote to writing.

In case you’re wondering, this new revelation was the result of some thinking I did following my blog posts on the Four Burner Theory.  I wrote an initial post concerning the FBT and then did a follow-up where I discounted the usefulness of the FBT.  If you haven’t read these posts yet, take a look.

Although I ultimately dismissed the Four Burner Theory, it nonetheless got me thinking about my own goals and priorities in life.  I realized that despite living a lifestyle I am very happy with, I wasn’t using the advantages provided by my lifestyle to accomplish the goals that were most important to me.  For instance, starting the Internet-based business was nice, but sitting down and writing was a necessity.  I wasn’t acting in accordance with my goals, so now I’m taking action to change that.

There’s another part to this scenario that should probably be discussed, and that involves money.  I very much want to write for the love of writing and telling a good story.  I don’t want to rely on writing to earn a living.  Because of that, I convinced myself that I needed a business or two to provide my income.  Once the revenue side of the equation was in place, I reasoned, then I could dedicate myself to writing. 

The problem with this way of thinking is, how much money is enough?  If what I’m making from my current business doesn’t satisfy me, what make me think that the money from two businesses will?  There’s always more opportunity out there.  In fact, I have given considerable thought to a couple of other businesses I could start once the Internet-based business is up any running.  But what about writing?  Unfortunately, I’ve allowed writing to get lost in all of this too many times.

Truthfully, I could use more money.  Who couldn’t?   But the time has come to get serious about writing.  I don’t know if everyone feels they were born to do one thing in life, but I do.  I always have.  And that one thing has always been writing.  I’ve already wasted too much time.  It’s time to get busy.