Monday, November 26, 2007

Writing Life

I read this today over at Flawed but Authentic. It echoed everything I’ve come to know about creative life and writing over the past few years. I spent a lot of my adult life feeling like, and telling people, I was a lazy writer because I so often would rather take a nap than sit at my desk. I also wasted a great deal of time feeling unable to write because I was happy and happily married and those things could not add up to writing as I knew it in my early life, in graduate school when I, to quote a dear teacher of mine, went running around with my hair on fire all the time.

It took me a long time to realize that even though my days of flaming tresses are long gone, I still have some creative juice in me. I still have the desire to write and (on occasion) something I really want to say.

Motherhood is a creative catalyst for many women and while becoming a mother cracked my heart open in ways I could not have imagined, it mostly made me tired. As madly in love as I am with my child, I don’t find myself tripping over legos to get to the desk and write about it. It’s almost as if the love is so deep within me, no words could ever conjure it out and onto the page.

When I quit my job this year it was a decision based on my need to find time to write and this is what I’ve discovered in the last few months:

that my creative life looks nothing like what I previously imagined and nothing like the lives of any of the other writers I know

that my approach to the desk is always a wary one

that no matter how much time I have to write, I will always write in short-ish bursts.

And all these things are just part of what makes up my writing life. They are not more good or less good than anyone else’s writing habits. They are what they are and they’re mine.

1 comment:

  1. I've never bought the notion that you have to live a dramatic (or tortured life) to be a writer. All you need is an imagination and to show up at the desk at least five days a week...I do anyway. Good post.

    ReplyDelete