It’s Complicated: Writers and Their Relationship with the Craft

musings on the nature of writing

Is Writing the Loneliest Pursuit?

If you are a writer, a would-be writer, or are lucky to know a writer or two, then you’re probably aware that writing is not a team sport. Writing is, indeed, a solitary activity.

The image of the writer, alone in her room, smoking Camels by the packs-full, while downing tankards of coffee or bourbon, is seared into our collective consciousness.

Think Hemingway, Anne Sexton, or Sylvia Plath. All were writers with a reputation for solo literary pursuit and a connection to addiction and/or mental illness.

The writer as enigmatic creature is a trope that never seems to die.

Writers are everyone; people who live simple lives or lives of renown. Writers are people with money problems, relationship problems, and drinking problems—or sometimes none of these things. A writer can be you and me.

In reality, a writer is less mythological beast and more hard-working artist or craftsperson. Most writers I know pursue their medium with a mix of zeal, focus, and despair. Oh, and lots of procrastination.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

—Kurt Vonnegut

Love/Hate

For many writers, even the most talented, writing is hard—even when a skilled writer makes the resulting prose easy to read. Their words play off one another like they were born together as the writer crafts phrases, metaphors, and memorable lines that keep us reading in pursuit of the next insight or delight.

And while we love reading good writing, lots of writers hate writing.

I hate writing sometimes. I like having written, and sometimes the act of writing is gratifying, but I don't love the act of writing, always, above all things (right now, I love blueberries more than I like writing, but that changes with the seasons. I'm fickle that way).

Yet still, I must write and I do love being a writer with all the prickly feelings that label entails.

Perhaps writers, like other creators, have a higher tolerance for misery. There's something compelling about the push-pull struggle of getting words down on paper—it's a challenge—like a puzzle, and one with endless solutions. It’s a vocation often punctuated by frustration, yet I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.

 —Ursula K. LeGuin

The Writing Process

Some writers keep to routines, and those routines are nearly as well-known as the writers. These writers have a schedule, often with rituals and implements like favorite pens, that help them create—or to at least write a predetermined number of words each day.

Disciplined writers, I’m not one, often wake at a specific time, and sneak to their writer's room or desk before they wake the household, making no contact with anything other than the family pet.

Dogs and cats always support their human writers—they make little to no criticisms and only demand a warm lap or the corner of a desk on which to rest.

Susan Sontag, in her 1977 diary, writes, "I will tell people not to call in the morning, or not answer the phone." See? No contact with other humans must be essential, because she was damn prolific! I only wish that not answering the phone would bestow upon me that same genius of Ms. Sontag's caliber. Alas, I'm well aware her output was owing to more than her refusal to answer the phone. 

So, What Makes a Writer a Writer? 

The most straightforward answer to what makes a writer a writer is: to be one who writes. Of course, writing won't guarantee a coherent and enjoyable essay or novel, nor will it get a person published, but it will, over time—lots of time—make one a better writer. 

Writing, a lot, is vital, but there’s something else. An intangible quality that's always in the back of a writer's mind—it's a feeling that she must write. Everything is fodder for stories or essays or poems (beware dating and then breaking up with a writer—don't say I didn't warn you). 

The writer wanders through the world with a lens focused on the often-missed details like Corsican mint pushing up through the crack in the sidewalk, or the quirky way the neighbor across the street wears her glasses slightly askew. And even when writers try not to, they sometimes use words like askew. 

As Hemingway said, "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."