Social obligations make you a better writer. Here's how:

For those of you who don't know already, I'm an active duty Staff Sergeant in the Marine Corps. That's only important because the Marine Corps Birthday Ball for my unit was on Thursday night, which typically means that the next day we have off (Marine's love to celebrate their birthday). It just so happened that this year, our ball coincided with the Veteran's Day holiday. This meant we had a total of FIVE CONSECUTIVE days off.

As a part-time writer, I was ecstatic. I would get to write for five uninterrupted days. My word count would be through the roof! Well, not so much. I needed to create a website, began building my social media following, put out ads, and commission artwork. Generally, I needed to do all of the things that indie authors like myself have to do one their own because they don't have the benefit of a large publisher to do it for them. These administrative yet oh so essential tasks took up the majority of my Friday. It was a 2k word count kind of day. Alright, but not great for my standards.

On Saturday, I finally got into the business of writing. I pushed out an incredible 12k words. I say incredible because it was a personal best for me. I felt like I was finally getting where I needed to be on my word count for the holiday.

Fast forward to today. Today was Friendsgiving with the friend group that I've come to know and love over the past couple of years. This Friendsgiving was something of a tradition that we were creating together. It wasn't until 3pm, so I figured that if I woke up early and devoted myself to writing, I could get a respectable word count done for the day before we had to leave.

Unfortunately, life doesn't always fit into our plans. Instead of writing, I ended up fixing a power outlet in my living through that had melted through (I only shocked myself twice). When it was time to leave, I hadn't written a single word that I wanted to. I almost considered canceling on Friendsgiving because I was guilty that I didn't get the words on the page that I felt I needed to write.

I think that's the trap that authors fall in to. We're so wording about crafting our worlds in our books that we forget to live our lives in the world we're in. I almost made that mistake.

See, social obligations make you a better writer. They remind you that the worlds we create are figments of our imagination. They're a shared hallucination between the author and the reader. The dream is only as good as the author makes it, and if we take too much ourselves and put it on the page, we forget the events in our life that make those dreams convincing. 

I ate good food and shared laughs with better friends around the campfire. We told stories, we joked, and we lived. Someday, when I try to capture the love and camaraderie of friends around a campfire, I'll remember this night, and I will have been better equipped to capture it for the reader. I will have been made a better writer by the social obligation I almost failed to keep.

I know many of you are worried about your word counts and the progress of your stories. I want to quickly remind you that you need to remember to live your life and to take care of yourself.

-DWB