Why Bother Writing at All?

If I was to pick something that’s a challenge—not just in writing, but in life more generally—it’d be the battle of ‘why bother’? Why bother going to the gym? Why bother having a blog, tweeting, running an author page, writing at all—let alone editing, submitting, (and getting rejected). Paying to attend conferences and events—why? 

Because You Love It…? 

Of course, the easy and accessible answer is that you love it. But I think it’s a little more complicated than that. After all, regardless of what we love (people, hobbies, favourite foods), that love can be a changeable, sometimes elusive beast. I mean… I don’t even love my cats all the time. That gives you some idea of how weird love can be. 

(On second thoughts, I’m not sure that statement is true: my cats are awesome. But the point still stands.)

What I’m getting at is that, even when you really enjoy something, that doesn’t make doing it easy. And it will, inevitably, always be easier to sit on the couch and watch TV than get into the gym and train, or sit down and write. Not necessarily more rewarding or even more enjoyable, but definitely easier. In a world where people are incredibly busy, struggling to juggle myriad different commitments, with various different demands on their time and energy, who can blame anyone for skewing towards what’s easy? 

What’s the Solution to ‘Why Bother’? 

Well, what’s the answer then? A lot of people advocating knowing why you’re doing something: what’s your big goal? What’s the end state? The idea is you have a set of beautiful shiny goalposts in your mind’s eye. Every time you falter or stumble, you cling to that image to get you there. I can see the value in that… But while I can totally understand that approach, I’m kind advocating the opposite. (I’ll get to what I mean by that in just a second.)

Why? Because what if you don’t have those shiny goalposts? Or what if you have one of those weird brains that looks at the goal and then asks why bother about that? You end up in a perpetual ‘why bother’ loop, and things get ugly. (Hope I’m not the only one with my hand up right now.) Somtimes if I look too closely at the why it seems so big and out of reach that it discourages me. I can’t imagine I’ll ever reach it. Perhaps I should stop instead.

In fact, if I look at anything challenging for too long, I begin to see reasons for not doing it. (Ah, the nature of challenge and self-growth!) And once you’ve found reasons for not doing something, it’s all too easy to stop.

An Example

Case in point is this blog. You might (or might not) have noticed a serious plummet in activity last year. Yes, I was busy, but I consciously let my blog fall away. When I asked ‘why bother writing?’, the answer was that the stipulated goal seemed unattainable.

Part of the reason I blog and post on my Facebook author page is to build an author platform that could help me look more marketable to publishers.6 Sounds like a pretty solid ‘why’, right? But what about when it’s not happening? When we’ve been trying to achieve something for a long period of time, the why can start to look shaky. And that was me, last year. What’s changed? Well, nothing. I’m still not getting the blog activity I’d like to; I still acknowledge that I don’t have much of a ‘marketing platform’ to take to a publisher. Which brings me to my next point: we need something else to fall back on.

Another Way of Looking At ‘Why Bother’

Really, it’s not another way of looking at ‘why bother’. It’s another way of moving forward and re-conceptualising the problem. Instead of pivoting on the ‘why’ to achieve goal, I treat daily/routine work on my hobbies or passions as things that just must be done because they’re a part of me. Those habits (as I talk about in my post Creating Habits) sustain me. They are just what I do. 

The result? I persist. 

I’m happy I’ve trained, without considering why I needed to train today. I’m happy I’ve written, without knowing how that 500 words of crap takes me closer to publication. I’m happy I’ve blogged or posted on my author page, without trying to calculate how it’ll translate into future success. In other words, I’m happy just knowing I’m working to become something more than I am now. Even if the big picture ‘why’ is still so far out of reach, I may never get there.

The goal is not the endpoint: the goal is the journey I’m on. The journey that’s allowing me to learn and grow and persist despite no sure promise of reward at the end, that is the goal.

So, why bother? My answer is, if asking that isn’t working for you, maybe try this instead: just do it. That, in and of itself, is the goal.

–A.