Don’t Starve a Writer

Writing is important – a part of our lives and being. It’s a job like any other, but it’s something more for those of us who need to create.

A husband, lover or young children will compete for time with a career as a writer. I know how tough that can be. So many of us (our loved ones and ourselves) forget that writing is a real job, with demands of mind and time. It’s easy enough to forgive our loved ones those stolen moments – they may not always understand what writing demands. But ourselves – sometimes we forget that writing is a real task – a job like that 8-hour a-day mind stealer that you left behind when you walked out of the office. We forget that we must dedicate a certain amount of time to writing every single day.

We find that we tell ourselves that writing is flexible. We can let other demands snatch at our attention, divide and divert us, and tell ourselves that writing time will flex around those demands.

And that’s how we get thinner and thinner – not our bodies, but our minds. (Sure, you can get skinny by chasing a couple of single digit munchkins around, but let’s skip that for a now.) By letting our writing job take second place (sometimes it should, most times it should not), we starve ourselves.

I keep saying we. I mean you and me. We need to write and not feel guilty, or rushed, or that we’re falling into a rut.