250 words

Ernest Hemingway once said that he "hated writing, but he loved 'having written'."

I think most of us that fancy ourselves writers can totally empathize with this sentiment. While it's enormously satisfying to be able to sit back and admire a piece of work you're particularly happy with, the process of creating it itself is almost always a tortuous trudge through laziness, lack of inspiration, and self doubt. Most of the time having the idea for a piece is the first and most difficult step, but almost equally hard is forcing yourself to sit down and start clacking away on the keyboard. I guess 'thinking' about writing is kind of fun, but actually have to work out the nuts and bolts of how your piece is going to be structured, what kind of tone you are going to use, how long it will be, etc. is a lot more like actual WORK, and thus, not nearly as fun.

Unfortunately, that's the only way to transform a thought into a written expression, so we're all stuck with it.

I have suffered from this conflict for most of my "writing" life; the joy and excitement of the inspiration for something, followed quickly by abject ennui and frustration when it comes to physically creating the work. To be fair, real life isn't always very helpful. You may be totally buzzed about heading home from work after having a great idea, anxious to commit it to paper (or cyberspace) but in the meantime, you have to fill up your car with gas, stop at the grocery store, pay some bills, do your laundry, fix something to eat, vacuum your carpet, take out the garbage and a million other "must dos" that pop up on a daily basis. All of these things are at war with the creative impulses, and all of them must be factored into your writing regimen. Compound these conflicts with the fact that all of these activities (in addition to your regular job) have the accumulated effect of making you tired, thus even less willing or able to commit ideas to screen.

This is usually the part of the essay where the author begins to suggest ways to counteract the problem. Unfortunately, in my experience, there really aren't many. You just have to do it. That is, you have to find a way to do all of those things and still write, because those other things are obviously important and are things that the whole world must contend with. But, if you've chosen to call yourself a writer, you've got the added burden of negotiating the arduous path of the practical with the imaginative, and there just isn't any easy way out.

You've got to find time. You've got to make the time. You've got to be prepared to lose sleep, skimp of meals, ignore phone calls, run the car on empty, let the laundry and dishes pile up and let the grass grow a little. As Maria Ouspenskaya spoke in the great 1940's film, "The Wolfman", "the way you walked with thorny, through no path of your own...". You probably didn't choose to be a writer, you just WERE. And it isn't easy.

I'm a horrible poster boy for time and/or resource management. I'm naturally lazy anyway (like, I suspect, a great many writers) and even in the best of times, I would always find a reason to not do the second step in the "imagine/write" sequence. I was tired, something good was on TV, I'd get into long conversations with someone , I had too many things to do. All of those were good enough reasons not to write, but if I'm truly committed to being a writer, they can't be good enough. I've got to dig in somehow and find a way to enforce some self discipline. I'm in my mid forties now, and if I'm EVER going to be serious about making writing my life's work (not just in financial context, but in a passionate, "life's work" sort of way), I have to find ways to get around all of these obstacles.

Today, I'm going to try a new way. Someone told me that they know a writer who commits at least one hour a day to writing, regardless of whatever else is going on in their lives. I think that's a great idea. It's one I've resisted for a while, rationalizing that that type of 'scheduled' writing is too mechanical and doesn't speak to the natural ebb and flow of creativity, i.e. 'ok, what if at my appointed time for writing I don't have anything to say?' That's ultimately a poor excuse, though. There's nothing stopping me from writing LONGER and MORE OFTEN than once a day for an hour; this is just a goal to write at LEAST that much. And if I don't have anything particularly original to say at 5:15PM on a Tuesday, for example, well, so what? The enforced scheduling might prompt me to be creative and cobble something interesting together the way having to "crunch" before an assignment deadline did in the past. More than likely most of the time I won't have anything tremendously interesting or original to write, but the very task of writing itself will be beneficial, if nothing else, a metaphorical "muscle stretching" to keep myself in practice. And that 'stretching' might come in very handy when/if I truly get inspired to write something that matters somewhere down the line.

So, here I go. I'd like to try for at least 250 words a day, which isn't much, ultimately; along the lines of a single double spaced eight by eleven inch page of typing paper. I've decided that whatever else I am in this life, I can be a writer when/if I apply myself. I guess it's just the "applying" part that I need to work on and hopefully, this is the start of that labor.

Into the breach...