Necessary Evils Aren't Necessarily Evil

When it comes to keeping yourself motivated, there are going to be a lot of stuff that you do in your life that you simply don't like doing. These are what we call necessary evils: paying taxes, dealing with bills, shopping, sometimes even just interacting with other people. While they are things that you don't like doing, that doesn't make them necessarily evil. More to the point, these can actually save us in a lot of weird ways. 

We need to get away from the keyboard every so often and just simply do other things. The so-called necessary evils actually encourage us to do exactly that, even if it's doing something that's non-writing at the keyboard, we still have to go out and do things like paying taxes, taking care of bills, even sometimes doing things that we need to do in order to pay those bills. Nonetheless, we have to. And then of course, there's family, with all of its expectations, landmines, and traditions; even successful writers need to answer the "when will you get a real job?" question. 

We need that human interaction. We need to connect with other people on some level, even if it's in situations that we really prefer not to do. And trust me, I know, as a writer, you tend to be extremely introverted; we like being hermits. That's fine. That's just part of who we are. But we have to realize that occasionally, we need to do human things, if for no other reason than to keep in touch with our humanity; we need that to truly understand the species that we usually write about.  

Again, this is gonna sound sort of weird, but occasionally in order to become really focused as a writer, we need to lose that focus every so often and do other things. Otherwise, we're going to basically go crazy where you drive yourself nuts and when we might be fun to be around, but in all the wrong ways. We need to go out and do all that really nasty stuff that we don't normally want to do just because it gets in the way of whatever we're doing. You know, it prevents us from developing blocks. It helps us develop characters, and gives us some really nice details we can use later on. 

By interacting with others, we reaffirm our humanity and continue to gather experiences and knowledge that helps to write better. So we're not really getting away from writing, but we are getting away from the keyboard. Remember that when you start looking at your necessary evils and all of a sudden you'll realize that those necessary evils aren't necessarily evil. Just inconvenient.