Of course, as Mickey Spillane said, it's amazing how easy it is to come up with ideas and to sit down to write when your accountant tells you your bank account is running low.
Writing for fun is fine, but if you;re writing with the intention of being published, or making money, or with the idea of making writing a career, you have to treat it as a job. It should be a job you love, but still a job.
You have to show up for work, and you have to do today's work, not next month's work. If it's writing that excites you, this is not a problem. If it's a daydream about some future thing that turns you on, you're in trouble.
Don't be excited by future projects. As bright and shiny as they seem now, they're just as much hard work as whatever you're currently working on. Get excited by writing, by sitting down and turning any project, any idea, into something that shines more than anything you have in the future.
Let me ask you this. Is the current project something that was a shiny dream a few months ago? When you start one of those down the road projects, will there be a new shiny dream on the horizon that makes the old shiny dream something that doesn't excite you?
This is how it works all too often when it isn't the writing itself that raises your flagpole.
You can sit down today, and you can turn whatever your current project is into something readers will love. You can sit down today, and you can create. You can turn nothing into something people love. This is a rare gift.
The project doesn't matter. It's sitting down and using a rare gift to create that matters. One of my projects that I thought would be boring turned into something I loved because it was difficult, and needed more creativity than usual. I had to write a short story of exactly one hundred words to match a chili recipe.
It sounded boring, but easy, and it paid a dollar a word. Only a hundred dollars, but my thinking went along the lines of, Well, I written a lot of 3,000 word short stories in only four hours. That's seven hundred anf fifty words per hour, so I should be able to write a one hundred word short story in twelve and a half minutes. Even if it takes half an hour, that's still a good pay rate.
Ummm, yeah, right. I've never told anyone this. I have, in fact, kind of hinted that I did write it in nothing flat. I didn't. For me, very short is tough. I didn't know it until after I started writing that thing, but it's tough. It took me three long days to get those hundred words the way I wanted them, and that was not a good pay rate.
But the difficulty, the creative challenge, the work of turning one hundred words into a good story that matched a chili recipe, was what mattered, and I felt more satisfaction finishing that little story than I had finishing almost anything else I'd done before then.
Make creative work the goal, make turning nothing into something the fun, and whatever you're doing today will become what matters.
Almost as important, what you do today is both practice and foundation for what you do tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. If today's work doesn't get done, and doesn't get done as well as you can possibly do it, the practice won't matter, and you'll have a foundation built on sand.