Not to shock you, but I’ve done some writing.

I know, I’m as surprised as you are.

To be honest, it wasn’t as aesthetically pleasing as this picture I’ve chosen might make it appear.

Truthfully, it was mainly me hunched over in a creaking office chair pretending my hands weren’t freezing because of the draught coming from my lovely, period-feature single glazed windows (insert upside down smiling emoji here).

But! There are words! And not too many of them are the same word!

I’m at the stage of writing where I can see exactly where this plot is headed, and the world is starting to come together. It feels… good. It also feels something else, and again, I’m as surprised as anyone when I say… I’m having a lot of fun.

This is not to say I don’t usually find writing fun. Honestly if I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t do it. There are plenty of other hobbies, right? But - and I have to be careful how I word this, because non-writers often struggle to understand this kind of chat - there are times when it’s not that fun, too.

I feel like this is also true if you’re a painter, or a photographer, or a game developer, though, right? Like, if you’re a painter, and it’s a hobby, but you want to be good at it and continually develop your skills, you are likely to come across techniques that you find harder than others to master. Maybe you’ll decide to paint a bunch of different version of the same picture to see your progress over time. Or maybe you’ll buy an artist’s sketchbook and decide to paint a miniature every day for a year to keep your skills sharp. And maybe, there will be days when you just really don’t want to do it, but you’ve promised yourself you’ll push through and do it anyway. Maybe you’ve even decided to update your progress on social media, so people are waiting for you to post. Or maybe there’s like, an art contest and you have deadlines if you want to enter and…

Yeah, under those circumstances, there might be moments where painting stops being fun. Temporarily.

Well, writing is very similar. So, like, the prevailing advice for writers is not to just stop working on something after a first draft. There’s other stuff to do from there: read it again. Find plot holes, or poor characterisation, or unbelievable dialogue, or all the hyphens that should be em-dashes, and rewrite the story, fixing those things.

And then you probably need to do it again, just to get it as good as you can. And if you want to actually try and get published, or publish yourself and get people to read your books, you might do it again, maybe with feedback from friends or editors, and then again, and possibly even again!

And we do this because we want our writing to be the best it can be, and when we’ve done that, there can be a huge sense of reward and achievement! And, sure, that might be a tangible reward, like someone leaving your book a nice review if you’ve published it, but actually most of it (at least for me) is internal. I’m happy when I’ve got a story to the best I can get it because I’ve usually mastered new techniques to get there, and because when I re-read what I’ve done, it feels good. I did that thing!

It doesn’t mean it was consistently fun or easy to get there. That’s probably where the widely attributed idea of “I don’t love writing, I love having written” comes from.

But right now (write now?) I am in this lovely position where what I’m writing currently… is fun.

I’m finding myself reluctant to go to sleep because I’ve got just-one-more-scene in me.

I’m thinking about my main character pretty much all the time. Why does she do what she does? What’s the worst thing that could happen to her (because I’m going to make it happen, obvs)? And I keep having these little ideas I need to immediately jot down so I don’t forget to add it in when I get back to my PC.

I’m planning to make the most of this feeling of fun, because I don’t know how long it will last. I described it on Twitter recently as a honeymoon period, and that’s exactly what it feels like. No doubt at some point I’ll fall into a deep unease about my ability to write at all, because that’s a thing that almost always follows a honeymoon period with writing for me, but I’m hoping this feeling will be with me for a while yet.

Long enough to get this draft finished? That would be nice!