Does Writing Need to be Useful to be Worthwhile?

I had a conversation with a friend recently about hobbies. She said she needs a new hobby, but the only one she could come up with wasn’t “useful.” This got me thinking – does everything we do have to be explicitly useful in order to be worthwhile? If our writing doesn’t feel particularly useful in any given moment, does that mean we shouldn’t do it?

I get it. It can be easy to think about the long list of things we have to do and feel guilty for spending some of our precious time on something that may or may not lead anywhere. We might have publishing goals, or we might not. But even if we have our sights set on publication, there’s no guarantee we’ll get there anytime soon. And when the laundry is piling up, dinner needs to be made, and the house is a mess, it can be easy to put writing on the backburner 

But what if I told you all of this could be simply one more excuse not to write? That telling ourselves our writing isn’t productive and therefore not worthy of our time is one more way to avoid doing it, and one more way of avoiding the possibility of failure?

We all have goals in mind for our writing. Whether we want to publish or not, we’re seeking something through the act of writing. And it can be frustrating as often as it is enjoyable and easy. And sometimes it’s honestly more enticing to do the dishes than sit at the computer staring at blank page.

But if we continually tell ourselves there are more “useful” things we could be doing at any given moment and putting our writing last on the list, we’re losing out on more than just progress towards our writing goals. We’re missing out on allowing ourselves to do something we enjoy, to recharge our batteries, to experiment with something we love. If we consistently put pressure on our writing to be useful in some way – to earn us a certain income, to give us a certain prestige, to prove something to the world – then we might quickly go from loving writing to resenting it.

In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about not putting pressure on your writing, that putting pressure on it takes the magic away. I know it can be hard when we have dreams of becoming published authors or quitting our day jobs to stay home and write full-time to not feel some type of pressure. But I’d encourage you to step back occasionally and allow yourself to write what you want to write – not what you think needs to be written or what feels like a useful thing to write in the moment – and see what magic happens.

Not everything we do has to be useful. Sometimes – many times – the beauty is in the moments when we’re not attempting to be useful and productive. Sometimes those are the moments we’re happiest, the moments we remember years later. Those are the moments that make getting through the busy days and stressful weeks worth it.