How to keep on writing when it all seems pointless

No-body is reading it, no-body is buying it, no-body cares – so why bother? What's the point in pressing on wasting your rapidly diminishing time on earth pursuing a hopeless cause? Why would you do it? Why would anybody do it? Here's why...

Someone's got to do it

So it might as well be you. How you going to live with yourself when the guy who lives two streets down from you with half your talent makes the big-time because he kept plugging away while you gave it all up to focus on your office-admin career? You're not going to feel very clever then. Give yourself a chance, keep yourself in the mix, and you'll keep improving in the meantime.

Practice makes perfect

All those years writing and being ignored aren't wasted – because all that time is spent improving your craft – by the time you do hit the big-time you'll be bloody good. Not only that, you'll have an immense backlog of work to publish which, perversely enough, everyone will think is great now you're famous, even though they wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole before.

What the hell else you going to do?

Let's face it, who wants to be in office-admin their entire life? It's not like your other job is 'rock-god'. Giving up the writing moves you from the person-with-shit-career-and-little-hope category into the person-with-shit-career-and-NO-hope category. Which one would you rather be in?

You're going to do it anyway

Writing gets under your skin - if you're the real deal, you're going to keep doing it no matter what, so get a smile on your face and keep on keeping on. If you're going to quit later, you might as well quit now and get on with the rest of your life, because a quitter is a quitter.

An unpursued dream is never fulfilled

Dreams aren't cheap. You can't buy them in Tesco. You have to define them, hew their likeness from stone with your bleeding hands then eternally pursue them as they fly from you like phantoms. Chances are you'll never catch them, chances are you won't even know where to look, but I'll tell you one thing for sure, you won't find them in the office-admin department.