Re: The Writing Impulse
Whenever anyone I work with finds out I keep this blog and try to update it every day, I always get the same response:
“Well”, he or she says cattily (which is the way most things are said around my office), “you must have a lot of time on your hands.” The implication being that I’m not working hard enough.
What they don’t understand (among other things) is that I’d be writing if I kept this thing or not. I write the way some people drink; if I don’t do some writing every day, I get tense, irritable, and everything seems just plain wrong. Come to think of it, that’s the way I feel about drinking, too*.
If I’m on a plane reading a lackluster novel, I’ll frequently ditch the book and start writing my own story to entertain myself. Given the choice between calling someone on the phone and writing a letter or an email, I’ll pick the letter or the email.
Every once in a while, I came across someone who says that they always wanted to be an artist/musician/dancer/whatever, but they never had the time (or were given the opportunity) to study it. This makes no sense to me.
All the creative types I know have been driven to do what they do. If they didn’t have the benefit of instruction, they just tried to work it out on their own, or just did it badly. It was something they had to do as a part of their homeostasis.
Which is why even though I have hardly any time to sit down and write the rent check, I find the time to write. It’s not an optional thing for me. Over the past few months, I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my wrists, so I’ve been given the choice of not typing so much, or deteriorating to the point of needing surgery. At that point, I had two PDAs, one with a built-in keyboard and one with a detachable keyboard, one laptop, and three desktop machines at home. I was typing every spare second of the day it seemed like. Now, I’m trying to teach myself to use the phone, since I’ve had to cut out about ninety percent of my social email (sorry everyone I haven’t emailed in a while!). It’s tough; you don’t get much editorial control over a phone conversation.
* That’s a joke. I don’t feel that way a lot of the time.
9:32:59 AM 
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