When do you know that it's time to *stop* writing? Is there something that happens that gives you that message, so to speak? A signal? Or is it just a sense you get that it's time to give it up?
Carol, you worded that so oddly. That's the kind of question I would expect from someone who was pursuing a professional career as a writer and had suffered years of rejections and was wondering when to say enough is enough.
From a fanfic writer who, I would assume, is writing for recreation, the question just seems odd to me. Don't you only write when you feel like it? Isn't writing just a pleasure and a way of expressing yourself? When writing is a chore instead of a pleasure, when you don't feel like it or don't have time for it, you let it go, the same way you would let skiing or knitting go.
OTOH, I want to be a published fiction writer. That's been my dream since I was 7, and I've never gone more than a few months without writing some kind of fiction. I don't know if I could give up writing; in fact, some of my private nightmares are centered around that very thing. Perhaps someday I'll quit pursuing publication and decide to just write for my own pleasure, but that's the only kind of giving it up that I can imagine.
