A friend of mine from high school came to visit me recently for a weekend. She is a wonderfully thoughtful person and an incredible artist, whose name you will all know someday from her work and I will get to say, “I knew her when.” Over the course of the weekend, we spoke about everything from jobs to family to writing to religion and all the stuff in between, catching up from when we’d last seen each other (actually only a month before), recounting the little moments of our lives rom when we’d graduated high school together till now.

One of the things she told me about was a line from a play that she’d seen that had struck and stayed with her and now has struck and stayed with me. I do not know the play’s name, and I am definitely misquoting the line – it’s my memory of what she said from her memory of the play. But this is the line that struck me:

“It’s not your job to love your job. It’s not your job to love your spouse. It’s not your job to love your children or your friends or your family. Your only job is to love your life.”

Initially, this felt like semantics to me. How could I love my life without loving my family or my friends or my job? What does it mean that my job is only to love the whole of my life and not the parts of my life? But on further consideration, I realized this idea of only having to love your life gives you the space to not love everything and to actively choose what to love.

I think we all would love to love our day-to-day jobs, but this idea says it is okay if you don’t. It’s not your job to love your job. It’s your job to do it, but that doesn’t mean you have to love it.

I struggled more with the concept of not having to love your family, but that’s probably because I do love my family, I’m lucky to be a member of a lovable and loving family, so of course I love them. But I know there are many people who aren’t as lucky, so being told that it’s not your job to always love them, or love them at all, could very easily release the burden and pressure of being forced to feel love for people who may not be lovable.

There is an allowance to not have everything be perfect and pristine.

This also means that when you do love something, like your job, or your family, or whatever it is that you love, it’s an active choice, not a given. You are free to give your love to whatever or whomever you so choose, no one but yourself telling you to do so.

There is freedom in this concept.

Your only job is to love your life. Love the life you are leading, love the life you are striving for.

If you only love parts of your life, then when those parts start breaking down or going through rough patches, what will happen to you? What if everything falls apart at once, because the world and life is messy and icky like that? What will you be left with, if all you love is parts and not the whole?

But consider the inverse – if you love the whole (and, because you love the whole, you are more likely to love many of the parts of your life that make it up), then when some of the parts break down, the whole will still be there to sustain you. Sure, you hate your job today, but you love the life you’re living. Sure, you had a fight with your friend, but you love the life you’re building for yourself.

While I think this is a concept to consider periodically in your life, checking in to take to stock of where you are and truly asking if you love it, I feel like this is a concept that can also be applied to writing.

Your only job with writing is to love the story you are telling. You don’t have to love the process. You don’t have the love the characters. You don’t have to the love the sentence structures. You don’t have to love the words you use.

Should you love all of these things? Yes, it makes it so much easier to write and a more enjoyable time if you do. But what if you don’t? Or what if you don’t love them all the time? It’s all right. That’s not your job. Your job is to just love the story you are telling, the overarching whole that you are striving for.

No amount of great characters and perfect sentences and lovely word choices and minutes spent typing will make up for a story you are tired of and can’t stand to tell. Because there are days when everything breaks down. You can’t get the words to come, the sentences are horrible, the characters are messy, and it looks like there is no end in sight. But if I love the story I am telling, I can push through those bad days, weeks even, holding on for the story that, because I love it.

It’s a gift to love all the parts of your life and all the parts of your story. But that’s not your job, it’s not what you have to do. Your job, the only thing you must do, is to love your life and the story you are telling.

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I started my first novel the summer after sixth grade. I was twelve years old. By the time summer ended, I was roughly halfway through the book. I think I wrote one chapter during seventh grade, if that. I don’t recall really touching it while I was in school. But during the summer after seventh grade, I finished it. I was thirteen and I had finished a real, full-length novel. The following summer was the first agent attempt, but that’s a different story.

Once I was finished working on my first book, I went back to write another. My head was teeming with ideas, as only a teenage mind can, and so when I had an idea that felt formed enough to get started, I would sit down to write and…nothing. Absolutely nothing. I wrote a page, maybe two, three if I was really lucky. But I couldn’t really get off the ground. I was a plane with fuel but no ignition. And then a new story idea would come around and I would try with that one. Wash, rinse, repeat, no luck.

I have distinct memories of worrying whether the novel I had written in middle school would be the one and only novel I would ever write. How could I have really peaked at age thirteen? I knew I wanted to be a writer. How could I be a writer if I didn’t write? I am sure I was a joy to be around during these moments, something my parents could attest to.

Then the summer after freshman year of high school came and I attended a summer writing program for a week at Sarah Lawrence College. I was part of Group 5, a bunch of teenagers from all around the country (despite being in NYC Tri-State area, we had someone from California and Michigan). I remember having so much fun with them for the week and laughing like never before. We stayed in touch after the program, which was a blessing to me, because that October, one of them asked if anyone was participating in NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is the challenge to anyone insane enough (raises hand proudly in the air) to write 50,000 words in the thirty days of November. It’s a free “competition,” run by the National Novel Writing Month charity, which promotes literacy and writing. I say “competition” because you are only competing against yourself. If you write the 50,000 words, you’ve won. So has your neighbor, your best friend, your frenemie, and that stranger on the other side of the world, as long as they each wrote the 50,000 words. Winners do get prizes, generally in the form of eternal bragging rights and discounts on writing software and other writing materials.

I decided to try this my sophomore year of high school. And what do you know, I wrote a novel in November (during which my computer had to be fixed, a nightmare on its own and again a different story). I had actually written another novel. I remember being so excited and relieved at the same time. Because here was a system that got me to commit to a story and write it.

Since that November, I have figured out that I write best under the following conditions: with a deadline and accountability.

Deadlines for me are when there is a hard stop for when something is due. The NaNoWriMo deadline has gotten me to write whole chunks, if not entire novels in the thirty days. Even if I have completed NaNo, but not finished the book, I have had enough written to keep going. Other deadlines, like my thesis deadline, have similarly helped to get me to sit down and write.

Accountability for me is when someone else is expecting work from me. I told my thesis advisor I work well with deadlines. He said, prove it, I want a chapter at the end of every week. He got a chapter at the end of every week and I went home for winter break of my senior year with a complete first draft of my thesis novella. I have now enlisted my sister to pose as a similar accountability enforcer. She gets to call me every weekend and demand that I send her what I have written the past week. Woe to me if I have nothing to send to her.

I sometimes wonder what advice I would give writers just starting and it’s this: find out how you write best. What conditions will get you to write? Is it a deadline? Is it writing a little bit every day? Is it prompts? Is it having someone holding you accountable? Is it a writing group? Try out different things until you figure out whatever it is that gets you sit down and put words on paper.

This also goes for the environment in which you write. Do you write at home? At a local coffee shop? In an office? At the library? Do you write with other people around? Do you write where no one can see you? Do you play music? Do you write in silence? Do you have a special playlist for each project? Do you have snacks at hand? Do you have your favorite tea steeping by your computer? Do you have a special sweater you need to wear? A blanket on your lap? A stuffed animal you get to cuddle or strangle depending on how the writing is going?

For the life of me, I don’t know how I wrote my first novel, how a story sustained me for over a year to completion. All I can say is that I was in love with it, so I wrote it. But sometimes you fall out of love with your stories or even if you love them, life gets in the way. What do you do then?

Knowing how you write best is a great set of tools to fall back on. It won’t always work. Sometimes the tricks just are not clicking, and you need to try something new. I recently started writing in ice cream parlors, because I wasn’t being productive at home anymore. My writing and my stomach are very happy. It’s much easier to try something new if you already know what’s old.

Ultimately, love of the story and the art will carry most writers across the finish line. Up until that last sprint though, when the end and victory is in sight, every writer could use the perfect recipe to keep us going.