Category Archives: The Writing Life

Seasons in the writing life

In the movies, writers spend all their time hunched over their desks, furiously scribbling or typing.

Then, at the end of the montage, a book is born.

As a kid, when I dreamed about “being a writer,” that’s what I pictured.

But the longer I work at that dream, the clear it becomes that being a writer has less to do with how many hours you spend at the keyboard and more to do with how you live.

In a particularly difficult phase of life somewhere in the unmapped wilderness of having just graduated from academic success into a search for real-world purpose, I once told a writer friend that nothing bad can really happen to a writer.

The worst thing that could happen to a writer might very well be the exact thing I dream of – a quiet, uneventful life with my dog and a garden.

Life happens. It keeps happening. And from it are born the stories.

And just as life has different seasons that shape and change us, so, too, do the seasons of our writing lives each contribute to the final form of the stories we’re made to tell.

Writing seasons are my favorite, but they’re also the most difficult. When I’m in the swing of a project – writing before work, writing after work, waking up early on the weekends to write – I feel most alive, productive and fulfilled.

But it’s a bit like carrying the ring of power. The story is on your mind all the time, urgent and heavy.

Then comes the painful-but-relieving tearing away of the eyes. For a time, you must look at anything but the project.

You discover reading again, and you take up poetry again. This is for enjoyment – for nourishment.

Then, toil.

This is the season I’m in now with my novel. I’ve spent the last 10 months editing, revising, forming and forming the text and doing the same with query materials.

A considerable portion of my Google Drive storage is now dedicated to various drafts of query letters and synopses. (How can it be so hard to write about what one has written?)

I’m in the long dark winter known as querying. It feels endless, but I maintain faith that, like the changing of the clocks come spring, something will shift and this season, too, will pass.

Do you find that your writing life goes in seasons, too? What season are you in now?

The struggle is real

Writing is hard, even in the best of circumstances. There have been times when I’ve been sat in my parents’ beautiful backyard in northern Vermont with no responsibilities pending, gentle spring sun on my skin, keyboard on my lap … and still, unable.

During the normal flow of life, the obstacles multiply. There’s work, laundry, trying to exercise, … a social life? …, dishes piling up in the sink. Time-management issues aside, the mental drain of it is enough to make writing feel impossible by the time there’s a spare moment for it.

To make matters worse, there are voices on all sides ready to tell you how wrong you’re doing it, if and when you manage to do it at all.

You have to write every day, they say. Or, why aren’t you reading more? Or, you better build your following online or no one’s going to care about your writing. Or, stop focusing so much on your following and get back to writing.

It’s stressful, and confusing, and heavy, and there are days that I find myself thinking “what am I even doing this for?”

There are sometimes weeks when I don’t write at all, and I think about letting it all just slip away. Let it be something I did, not something I do.

But somehow, I always find my way back to writing.

In college, a fiction professor gave me a simple piece of advice: “Don’t be a writer unless you can’t not.”

That’s a nice way of saying: “This is gonna suck! If you’ve got a shot in hell of being fulfilled without doing this, DON’T DO IT!”

Which is really just another way of saying what Franz Kafka said in a letter to Max Brod in July 1922:

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”

That’s how I know I have to write. Because when I’m not writing, I become a monster courting insanity.

So I write because I can’t not. And maybe someday, that’ll mean something to a reader.

For now, I’m locked in a cycle of self-editing, revising, querying and collecting rejections like postage stamps. It’s fun, at times. Most of the time its just work. But it’s the kind of work my soul can’t live without.

It’s lonely work, though. So tell me, where are things at with your big writing project right now? Does it feel like writing is making you more human, or are you stuck in a monster period?