I think the best thing Neil Gaiman has ever said about writing is this: "Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."
Never has anything rung more true to me. This past weekend was a great writing weekend for me. I hit the 1/3rd point in a book I've been trying (and failing) to write for 12 years. It is the one novel that I loved more than any other project I've had, and it is the novel that has suffered from my chronic stop-starting.
I have a tendency to get wildly discouraged by the bad days, the days when it feels like work. Then I don't allow the good days to boost me back up, at least until recently. The hardest thing for me to learn is how to work on all of those days - the good and the bad. I have had to learn to let the good days feel wonderful, and to let that wonderful feeling help me through the days that suck so hard that I wonder if I should even be a writer. I love Towers of Carlowe. Every moment of writing it has been a revelation to me. It has showed me how my writing style has evolved over the years. It has showed me how wonderful it is to handwrite in a notebook. It has helped me rediscover the fact that writing is an act of creation and, like all acts of creation, that's a beautiful thing.
But I've had bad days. I've had God-awful days. I've had days where I wrote one sentence and, even when I knew what I was going to write next, I just sat and stared at the blank page. Those days are painful days, because I switch off the light at my desk and go to bed and I think: Wow. Well that got me nowhere near my week's goal.
At the same time, on those days, I've learned to allow myself to feel that and then let it go. I've also learned to stop making the goals carry too much pressure behind them. I set the goals - goals that will push me, and be hard to reach - but not goals that will make me lose confidence in my ability if I don't hit them. By doing that, by positively reinforcing myself, I have not yet missed a goal.
I think writing is about learning to write in all conditions: to write when it's fun, when you feel inspiration flowing from your pen, and you can't stop yourself, and you stay up until three morning without even noticing; to write when it's work, and you feel like you're pulling out your own teeth just sitting down at your desk, and you barely get anything out.
At this point in my life, I have never felt more inspired to work hard toward my goals. And I'm not inspired by the good days as much as I thought. I'm inspired by the bad days where, after a whole day at the office, I still sat down and I did something. The days where, even when it sucked, my passion for this work beat out everything else. The good days are wonderful, and Neil Gaiman is right - on the good days, nothing else matters but how good of a day it was. But the bad days are pretty damn wonderful as well.
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