Before I started writing professionally lo these 10 years ago (jeez, that long? When do we sing Auld Lang Syne?), I had all sort of fantasies about the life I'd lead as a brilliant man of letters: Sleepless nights, lightning bolts of inspiration, flinging witticisms at New Yorker cocktail parties and sleeping with fawning acolytes. I still think what I do for a living is wildly sexy or else why would I get out of bed in the morning? Beats the years I spent at video stores.
But time works a number on us and with that comes the very real acceptance that after fantasy has become reality, you must settle in and deal with it as such. Welcome to work. And work, often, is just work.
I go to work every day. My office may be a coffee shop or my couch, my desk a laptop computer. But it has the same drugery a morning commute has. Society might think writing is fancier than working at the post office but society doesn't have to do either of those things every day.
I try and bring this home everytime I speak to groups of aspiring writers. There's nothing wrong with dreaming but if you want to be a writer, you can't live there. You have to start acting as if this is the life you want. Because no one will treat you as a writer if you don't treat yourself as one. You can't bet on someday. Someday has to be today.
All this came about from Rob Long's commentary this week on Martini Shot. I quote. And cheer.
Every now and then I make the mistake of reading an essay by a writer writing about writing. I know you've all read this kind of thing before. It goes, "The craft of writing -- and I call it a craft, not an art, for there is too much an element of joinery and carpentry to be pure art -- but it's an ancient craft, the craft of the shaman in the fire circle, the troubadour, the world creator."
We've all been there, Rob. It's cute for a while, then it's like your lover calling you "lum lum" in public.
At which point I skim down to the part -- and it's always there -- where the writer says something like, "I don't really write. It's like I'm taking dictation from my imagination. I create a world, and characters that live and breathe, and I wait for them to tell me what to write. And when I'm really in the zone, it's like I don't even know what time it is."
Sometimes I get really snotty as a non-fiction writer and want to sentence all novelists to a year as a general assignment reporter for a daily newspaper. When you have to file at 4 PM everyday, see how "in the zone" you can be.
I try not to act this way now. Here I repent.
See, here's where I get uncomfortable. Because when I'm writing, I know what time it is at pretty much every moment. I know when it's a little too early to think about lunch. When it's exactly time for lunch. When it's okay to take a break after lunch. When it's time to click on to Defamer. When it's time to check email. When it's time to think about a snack. When it's time for a diet coke. When it's a little too early to suggest stopping for the day. When it's exactly the right time to suggest stopping for the day. And when it's the right time to think about where I'm going to have lunch the next day.
My zone lasts two hours, the length of my "Writing" iTunes playlist. It's how I work best.
As writer, we all have to figure that out for ourselves. The best place to start is by getting real.
