Thursday's Children: Never Kick the Habit

Posted by: Jeff McKown

Thursday's Children is a weekly blog hop where writers come together to talk about what inspires them. I'm participating today and you can too. 

A link to other Thursday's Children writers is at the end of the post.

Thanks to Rhiann Wynn Nolet for orchestrating this affair.


Writing fiction is a lonely and foolish obsession. Finding one's voice, twisting and manipulating language to tell a compelling story, developing characters, teasing out story arcs, building tension.

Reading it, hating it, re-writing it, and hating it only a little less.

The act of creating something from nothing and crafting it to be as good as you know it can be is alternately discouraging, tedium-inducing, and brain-frying. But enough with the good news.

The worst aspect of nursing a hardcore writing addiction is knowing that some people make a living doing it. Some authors are actually compensated for the hard time they do in the vocabulary salt mines, and knowing that a small percentage of writers are paid to pursue their obsession makes it that much harder for the rest of us to quit. Imagine how much more difficult it would be for a junkie to give up heroin, if being a smack addict was a respectable paying job.

My chances of earning an honest wage as a fiction writer are in the same ballpark as my odds of scoring a winning Powerball ticket, and yet, I keep going. I write because certain stories deserve to be told (or maybe because I need to tell certain stories), and because not writing leaves me bloated and full of words that should have been shared. I write because not writing feels like leaving the dock just before the ship comes in. Not writing, for me, is wrong.

Those are my truths, though I must confess, I haven't been entirely honest with you. When I said the worst part of writing is knowing some people make a living at it, I lied.

The worst part of writing, or creating art of any kind I imagine, is committing hours and hours and hours of your life to a project, and still thinking it sucks. When that happens, and if you're a writer it will, the urge to give up on writing will be strong. You'll be tempted to burn your copy of Stephen King's On Writing and hurl your laptop out the window. Don't do it.

A few weeks ago, just as I was drowning in disappointment over the absence of literary sparkle in my current work-in-progress, an inspiring video from NPR's Ira Glass came to my rescue.

The clip is short and you can watch it here, but if you don't have three minutes to spare, the gist of Ira's advice is this: Everyone sucked when they first started. Create as much as you can, and the quality of your work will improve.

So, there you go. If you're saddled with a writing habit that is sometimes troublesome and unrewarding, don't be discouraged, and for God's sake, don't quit. Some habits shouldn't be kicked, they should be nursed, like a tumbler of Jameson.

If you're compelled, as I am, to keep stringing words and phrases together in the hopes of someday getting it right, stay with it. Figure out the story you want to tell, and follow it wherever it leads. You won't be happy if you don't.


Click here to view other Thursday's Children blog posts, or check out Rhiann's website for more info.