Lately I’ve been hanging around a lot on Tumblr. Because of insomnia, mostly. Although, can it still be called insomnia when it’s not actually the inability to sleep, but the inability to turn the computer off? Probably not.

The point is, I’m hanging around on Tumblr a lot, and I like it. There are a lot of young writers there, who are working really hard at writing. And it makes me go aww, because I can remember when I was young and earnest and serious about writing. And it’s almost as if these younger people think that if only they stumble on the magic piece of advice, or the one little trick someone shares, that they’ll suddenly know how to do it.

They’ll suddenly have their book.

I wish it were that simple. It isn’t. There is no magic piece of advice, or secret trick that only the initiated know. Or, if there is, I’ve certainly stopped looking for it. To me, writing is something you learn by doing, and you will always learn something new. And I really can’t stress how important it is for me to learn new things, because I get bored very, very easily. Really, I’m usually only ten minutes away from my inner child declaring the whole thing a bust, and going home.

This is literally what I used to do as a child. Sometimes in the middle of hide and seek. My friends’ mothers used to have to phone my mother to see if I’d actually got home, or if I was hiding somewhere super fantastic.

Writing, luckily, is the sort of thing that keeps me interested. It’s never boring. If it were, it’d stop doing it. Which isn’t to say that I wake up every morning with the muse nudging me. Hell no. I have to hunt that contrary bitch down every time.

Writing is hard.

But not writing is harder.

The only advice I can ever give newer writers comes down to this:

If you love it, keep doing it.

If you’re in it for the money or the fame, stop now and save yourself the heartbreak.

The other day at work I was on an afternoon shift. That’s means I started at 2 p.m. and finished at 10 p.m. A colleague of mine asked me how the writing was going.

“Good,” I answered, as vaguely as I always do, because I’ve learned that when people say that, they don’t really want to know about those edits that are killing you, or that one character you can’t quite get a handle on, or that plot point that’s way too shaky.

And then I told her that I’d be going home to work on writing for about five hours before bed. Okay, so three of those hours will probably be spent on Facebook and Tumblr, and another hour reading fan fiction, but hey, it’s apparently all part of my undisciplined process. I didn’t share that, though. I kind of like the idea that people think I’m a workaholic in at least one of my jobs. Because clearly it’s not the day job.

And, looking back, five hours a night on top of eight hours of the day job does sound like a lot. But here’s the thing: I look forward to those five hours. Really. They’re my reward at the end of a day.

Which brings me back to this: If you love it, keep doing it.

And that’s not just advice for writing, of course. That’s advice for everything. Because once you find something that is its own reward, it doesn’t feel like work anymore. It feels like play. And even if I didn’t always get the idea of playing right when I was a kid, I think I’ve finally figured it out now. And at least nobody has to phone my mum anymore and check that I made it home okay.