A Good Discipline

When I look at my professor's writings, I think about all the things I need to do to improve, and what it would take for me to be at a similar level of writing, stylistically and so on. What I recognize from that exercise is that writing is definitely a social discourse, having its rules, audience and intentions. I believe that the first time I ever truly recognized this point was back in 2002, when I decided to have some of my poems published through an amateur magazine. Up to that point, I had been writing poems primarily for my own interest, but when I had to actually consider their market, I realized that there is more to professional writing than simply writing what one feels like writing. I would even go so far as to say that professional and 'hobby' writing are completely different beasts. It is not good enough for me to simply see professional writing as a polished version of what I write for myself. Rather there are specific things that people look for, and it's quite hard to satisfy those wishes if one doesn't have a community which shows the way.
    Does this mean that writing for oneself has no value? Actually, quite the contrary, it suggests that the two kinds of writing are normally separate yet equal. Whereas professional writing often extends the writing of others in community, I tend to think of my own writing more like a self-discovery, where I am trying to work things out and make sense of them. I think that daily writing is 'good discipline', not insofar as it might get a person closer to writing for a market, but because it encourages a kind of articulation of how one thinks and feels which is not always captured in the final product of a writer's book or short story. In a sense, the two purposes of writing can complement each other and give a writer motivation to continue her or his craft.