Writing started with reading my way out
I love to write because I first loved to read. As a kid, books were how I got out of a house that was hard to be in. The love of writing started as a love of escape.Share on X
I do love to write. But the love didn’t start with writing. It started with reading, and it started young, because books were how I got out.
I grew up in a difficult household. My father was a hard man to live with, and the home had a long shadow over it. What saved me was reading. At five I fell hard for an illustrated copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the original unsanitized versions. My mother noticed, bought me an encyclopedia set, and dragged me to the local library against my protests.
A kind librarian gave me a cookie and a tour, and I walked out of that building understanding something that changed my life. The world was much bigger than the one in front of me.
After that I read constantly. Science fiction got its hooks in me at a swap meet, then my grandmother’s storage boxes delivered Stranger in a Strange Land into my hands and the genre stuck for life. That’s where my love of writing comes from. Not from wanting to be an author.
From being a kid who found a door out of a hard place and never stopped walking through it. I love to write because writing is the other side of that door.
The Love Is Real, and It Is Not Enough
Love gets you to the page. It doesn’t get you to book one hundred. The writers who finish run on habit and stubbornness.Share on X
I Love to Write Day can turn into a greeting card if you let it.
The love is real, but the love isn’t what produced more than a hundred books under my name and dozens more for clients. If I’d waited to feel the love every time I sat down, most of those books wouldn’t exist. Love is unreliable. It shows up some days and vanishes on others, usually the days you most need to work.
Inspiration is a guest. It comes when it wants and leaves when it wants, and you can’t build a career on a guest’s schedule.
What built the books was habit and stubbornness. Showing up on the days the love didn’t. Writing the next chunk because it was time to write the next chunk, inspired or not. The writers who finish are the ones who kept going when the loving stopped. That’s most days. That’s the most freeing thing a writer can learn.
Why That Is Good News
If love were the requirement, almost nobody would finish a book, because nobody loves the work every day. That you can write well without feeling inspired is what makes a writing life possible.
I’ve written through grief, through exhaustion, through stretches where the words felt like pulling teeth. The work got done anyway, and here’s the strange part. Often the writing I did on the loveless days was indistinguishable from the writing I did on the inspired ones. The reader can’t tell which paragraphs you enjoyed writing. The page doesn’t record your mood. It only records whether you showed up.
So the love matters, but not the way the holiday implies.
The love is the seed. It’s the reason you started and the thing that pulls you back during the good stretches. But the harvest comes from the habit, the unglamorous daily return to the page whether you feel it or not. Learn to write without the love, and the love becomes a bonus instead of a requirement.
The love is the seed, but the harvest comes from the habit.
How to Build the Habit the Love Cannot Replace
If you love to write but don’t finish, the problem is your system. (More on Scott Belsky's Making Ideas Happen) And a system is buildable.
Write on a schedule. Pick a time, a word count, or a page count, and meet it whether or not you’re inspired. Make it small enough that you can hit it on a bad day, because the bad days are the ones that matter. A streak survives on its worst days.
I write the way I do partly because my own brain doesn’t cooperate on command, so I build the cooperation into the structure instead of waiting for it, an approach I lay out in the ADHD Writing Handbook.
The goal is to make writing automatic enough that it survives the days you don’t love it. That’s the game. When showing up is a habit instead of a decision, you stop needing inspiration to grant you permission, and the books start to add up.
| Element | How it works |
|---|---|
| Schedule | Pick a time, word count or page count |
| Size | Small enough to hit on a bad day |
| Streak | Survives on its worst days |
| Structure | Build cooperation in instead of waiting for it |
| Goal | Writing automatic enough to survive loveless days |
How do you spend I Love to Write Day?
Write something. That’s the obvious answer and the correct one. November 15 is a fine day to enjoy the thing you love, so spend an hour doing it without pressure or purpose. Let it be fun, the way it was before it was ever work.
But do one more thing. Notice whether you only write on the days you feel like it, and if so, that’s the thing to fix. Pick a tiny daily commitment you can keep even on the worst days, and start the streak today. (More on my review of The Write-Brain Workbook) The love brought you here. The habit is what will carry you to the book you keep meaning to write.
I still love to write, all these books later.
But I don’t depend on the love, and that’s exactly why I get to keep doing it. Honor the love on November 15. Then build the habit that makes the love sustainable, because the two together are how a reader becomes a writer becomes an author who finishes.