On Loving What You Write
New writers are often told to ignore the market and focus on writing what they love. It’s solid enough advice, for what it’s worth, but I think there’s a flipside to that. At some point, no matter what the project, you need to figure out how to love what you’re writing. There are probably writers out there who can write a whole novel without coming to loathe or fear the manuscript, but I do not come across them all that often. What’s far more common are the conversations where doubt has seeped in, or an idea that was once exciting and shiny has grown worn down with use and the realities of sitting there and putting words on the page. Ideas move away from their Platonic ideal as you write them, because execution is harder than imagining. The set up of the first act is significantly more exciting than the delivering on that promise in the second and resolving it
