Storytellersunplugged

Here’s one trick about writing: Sometimes you have to do it even when you don’t want to. If you write full-time for a living, as I do, it happens more than you (or I) might want to think about.

Writing is a dream, right? Something a lot of writers do to get away from their day jobs, their families, their lives. The idea that you might be able to do it all the time and make a living at it, well, you’d be a fool to complain, wouldn’t you?

Yes. Yes, you would.

While writing on command about any particular topic, even one you choose, can sometimes be like pulling an angry tiger’s teeth, it still beats most other jobs all hollow. You get to sit in front of a computer in an air-conditioned room, coming up with things that intrigue you—and hopefully your readers—while other people must slave away in the hot sun or the freezing cold or spend endless hours doing mindless work that they hate. To complain that writing doesn’t always beat skydiving for thrills is churlish at best.

Sometimes, when the words flow from your fingers like water through a broken dam, writing can take you away. Writers live for those moments, and they happen far less often than any of us would like. The rest of the time, we have to just sit down, strap ourselves in, and start typing.

That, though, is why anyone pays for writing. Professional writers come up with the right words—or at least the next best thing—when they’re needed. They don’t wait for the muse to strike. They hunt down that damned muse and strike her until she coughs up the goods.

Some people think you can’t force inspiration. Maybe they’re right—for them. Me, though, I find nothing as inspiring as a deadline coupled with a blank page. That, and my mortgage, my car payments, and all the other bills that come along with a young family of seven.

We all write for our own reasons, of course, and for many of us those reasons change over time. Maybe we manage to exorcise the demons of our youth. Perhaps we finally find a way to tell that story that’s been burning in our hearts for so long. Sometimes that’s enough, and those people stop writing. They are no longer writers. They wrote.

Those of us who keep coming back to it, though, have to find something that keeps us going, that lures us back to that empty page. For me, it’s the sense of exploration, of discovery, of coming up with something new every time I approach a project, no matter the topic, time, or place.

Coming up with new ways to say new things, that’s easy. The novelty is inherent in the subject. The topic pulls the reader along no matter how artful or artless the prose.

Devising new ways to say the same things, though, to keep people reading—to keep yourself writing—on topics so well-trodden that writers have laid strata over them, like building over the ruins of Rome, that’s the true challenge. To do that, you have to love not what the words are about but the words themselves and the process of putting them together in better ways.

That’s what makes me love to write, even when I don’t want to.