Is It Okay If Writing Is Just A Hobby?

Behind the Book: Your writing questions answered.

Here is another installment of your writing questions answered! Today we cover writing for fun, how to start an article, and how I structure my manuscripts!

“Is it okay if writing is just a hobby for me and not a committed everyday practice? I feel impostery.” You know that saying, “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”? Well that’s bullshit. It’s more like, “If you do what you love for work, it will become…work.”

I love writing and I feel very privileged to be able to make it my career. Sometimes it feels like I need to write. I don’t believe in “calling” per se, but I do believe that I’m doing the thing I’m supposed to be doing right now.

But do I like writing? Not all that often. Why? Because it’s a job. Because I would pretty much always rather be doing something that is not my job.

I also love makeup. If you follow me on social media you probably already know this. I post selfies of looks I’m particularly fond of or had a great time creating and I will often receive comments like: “If writing doesn’t work out for you, you could totally be a makeup artist.” Which is like…I’m pretty deep into this writing thing for people to still be looking for my backup plans (are y’all tryna tell me something?), but also I would never want to be a professional makeup artist because I really enjoy makeup and I enjoy it as a relaxing, fulfilling hobby. I want it to stay that way so I will not be making it my job - even if this writing thing doesn’t work out.

“How do you begin an article? A thesis sentence? Free-writing?” This was something I used to struggle with SOOOO hard at the beginning of my career. I could formulate a great argument in my head, I could even write down some great middle and end paragraphs. But the beginning? I just really couldn’t figure out a way to introduce my topic. I was frustrated with staring at a blank screen over and over, so I just started writing from wherever my brain was at with the topic. Sometimes that would be the middle of the piece, sometimes just the conclusion. I would write from there. Once I got as far as I could go, I would ask a writer friend or two with more experience to take a look at it, begging for any insight as to how I should start my piece. Almost every time, the more veteran writer would point to a sentence or two in my final paragraph and go: “There. That’s the opening of your essay.”

So for a while, that’s what I did. I would just write whatever was in my head to write and when I was done, I’d scan the end of the piece for something that I felt like really summed up what I was trying to say, then I’d control-x and paste that baby right in the front and turn it in.

Eventually, what it taught me was that I am someone who needs to flesh out a thought first before I can summarize it for an introduction. I don’t usually need to pick from the end of my pieces anymore - I know my writing well enough now that I can usually flesh out some of my points in my head before writing but sometimes I still need to wait to the end of writing a piece to go back to the beginning and write my opening.

For example, the opening for this piece is currently blank! It says this:

“Here is another installment of your writing questions answered! Today we cover -”

That’s it. That’s the opening paragraph right now because I don’t know which questions I’m going to answer yet or what amazing answers I’m going to give to them!

“When do you start building structure in your manuscript? Is it when starting the first draft, or later?” For my articles, I am pretty structured from beginning to end. I work out a pretty strong thesis in my pitch and then I usually hand-write my outline and write from there. But I’ve been writing articles for quite a few years now so I know the structure that works for me like the back of my hand (what does that saying even mean? Don’t tell me if it’s bad. No, I’m not going to google it).

When I’m writing books I have both a structured and unstructured approach at the same time. My books are all fairly heavily researched and often have a lot of interviews, so I have to have some structure in order to know what to research and who to speak to. I start with a rough idea of what to research and use my research to identify interview subjects. These two important parts of my work, the research and the interviews, will help me in getting a better idea of my book’s structure.

So I usually have a pretty clear idea of what I’m going to write, chapter by chapter, before I begin writing. But I usually have no idea what order those chapters are going to look like. Sometimes, like with the book I’m working on right now, my interviews have shown me that I can’t actually figure out what my chapters are going to look like until I’m done with my first draft. Does that make sense? No? Ok, well basically it means that the subjects and people I’m interviewing are complex and intertwined and I've realized that I can’t be like, “Oh you go in this chapter” because everything could honestly go in every chapter. So I’m just writing….I’m bouncing from subject to subject, interview to interview, just writing a few thousand words until I think I’ve said all I can at the moment about that particular person or subject and then moving on. When I’ve covered it all, I’ll then take a look at it all and mix it up, cut what doesn’t work and add where things are missing.

I know that sounds like a mess - and it is! - but life is a mess and writing often is too. For me, I can plan a book forever and never actually get around to writing it. So this is how I get out of my own way.

It’s similar to how I wrote Mediocre and So You Want To Talk About Race. I had like 30 different folders with different topics and subtopics that I wrote about and then I brought them all together into a cohesive manuscript at the end of my first draft. It works for me, and with this book I’m having to lean into that chaos heavier than I ever have before. But it all works out in the end (although I did lose one entire chapter of Mediocre in the digital pile of folders until the final edit when I was like, “Wait…didn’t I write more about this??”

The point is, don’t stress too much about structure or form. Just get out of your own way and write. You can always edit later, but you can’t edit what you never get on the page.

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