The moment I thought about making writing my job, writing ran away and disappeared.
Whenever I tried to write while thinking, 'Maybe one day I can earn money by writing...', writing would run away at incredible speed.
'Wait? I was thinking about 'one day,' not right now, right? Come back out!'
I searched desperately, but it wouldn't come out. It must have been the moment my thought of "one day, I'll make this my job" unconsciously shifted to "I have to write something proper starting now".
Write something proper. But how? What does it even mean to be proper?
If I want to make money, I have to provide something proper. But what kind of thing is that 'proper thing'?
These are thoughts that didn't appear when I was just writing what I wanted to write. Is this what they call worldly desires?
Writing something proper and making money in exchange for writing for fun disappearing? If that's the case, I'd rather choose to write for fun. Because I'm happiest when I'm writing.
When I decided to throw away 'writing properly' and just write exactly what I was thinking, look, writing came back.
Before writing this, I wrote a draft of about 2,000 characters that didn't feel right at all. I didn't know what I wanted to say, and even though I wrote it desperately, it wasn't interesting. In fact, even though I opened it to reread it, all that came across from that text was a gloomy sense of boredom.
Whenever I aim for something, I end up like this. I become a boring person. When I write with an aim, I lose track of what I want to say entirely, try to cram in everything good I know, and it becomes a mess. Then I delete it. And nothing gets finished.
I always wonder what all that effort was for, and end up feeling depressed that I just threw away my time.
I guess I don't need money from writing after all. For now, anyway. I don't know what my future self will think, but the more I try to turn it into money, the less I'm able to write anything interesting at all.
However, if I ever really want to write about something private, I might write it exactly as I like and turn it into a paid article.
But thinking about writing to earn money from the very beginning is probably still a long, long way off.
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