I am being told I am working simply too hard on my writing, to the exclusion of other matters of importance that are simply being ignored. I can't help it, I have to write and it feels like the first priority. I have been known to miss a day of work to re-read a Harry Potter book in advance of the next release, so I am fairly obsessive. But when do you know that you are too involved? I feel I am doing the right thing. I want to get to my own set deadlines and if I stop now, I fear I will never finish and will lose momentum. Anyone else who is in my position? Any comments?
Thanks David, Emelia. Yup, I took a sick day off work to read Harry Potter. That job was shit anyway. : ) Perhaps that was what it told me.
Then many years at a job I loved and almost no writing. Now, some part-time stuff and flexible hours and I do struggle to balance, though I love both jobs. There is an inner deadline- I don't want to be writing this book for the rest of my life-honestly I want it off my back. It is like a project that never gets done.
Perhaps that was what Orwell wrote about. Unlike work, this time, there is no pay check to take back for your hard work, no assurances and almost no reason to torture yourself. Some of the writing is more relexed-an article for the local paper, a short story that I can build up over the years. But the book? its been a few years already and I can smell the end, hence the obsessiveness.
I'm exactly the same. Only recently I became extremely obsessed with a story I was writing and spent so much time on my laptopn trying to complete it I started to neglect everything around me.
As I've been unemployed and out of college for two years (I can't get a job without experience but then I can't get experience without a job, it's very annoying) I can't really say I'm so obsessed as to miss a day of work, when I was in college I never actually got so obssesed with what I was doing. And missing a day wasn't an option with my parents.
But I get where you're coming from. I have to do it NOW while I'm motivated and I have the ideas otherwise it never gets done. This has actually before. And I get obssesed with films so that I have to watch it every day and lose out on sleep or I miss something going on elsewhere.
Oh yes - the Orwell thing is fanciful bunkum.
One writes because one wants to write - the degree of "pain" is something that one opts to accept - or not... It is not something one cannot avoid or resist.
Alcoholism and drug addiction are, by degrees, "illnesses" that afflict individuals and their families and friends - writing is not - and it never should be.
:-)